


Root Cause Analysis

by Guede



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alpha Lydia Martin, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amorality, Crack Treated Seriously, Curses, Dark Comedy, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Failwolf, For Science!, Gallows Humor, Human Alpha Stiles Stilinski, Idiots in Love, Inappropriate Humor, M/M, Pack Dynamics, Polyamory, Scott is a Good Friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 08:37:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6604192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Oh, my God,” Stiles says.  He stares blankly at his half-composed text, then jerks his head up to look at the suddenly-wary pair of werewolves standing in front of him.  “Oh, my <i>God</i>, Derek, you’re actually right for once!  We’ve never checked for curses!  Oh, my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.  I am so slacking, I swear, I don’t know why, but hang on, let me just get Lydia on the phone and we’ll get right on that.”</p><p>Derek presses his lips together, then shifts just the tiniest bit away from Stiles.  “I already regret this,” he mutters.<br/> <br/>Derek’s dating record isn’t just tragic, it’s completely improbable.  Something else <i>has</i> to be going on.  And as co-alphas, Stiles and Lydia are determined to get to the bottom of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Root Cause Analysis

“I think I’m cursed,” Derek grunts, struggling out of the chains.

“No kidding,” Stiles says, trying to text Lydia and Laura that they’re clear. He frowns as blood smears over his phone screen and tries to wipe it off, only to just smudge it closer to the brand spanking-new cracks in the glass. And this is his second phone this month. “What clued you in, exactly? The fact that, yet again, we’re dragging your stranger danger poster boy ass out of a hole? Like, literally, Derek, there is a hole in the ground, and you are in it.”

“Well, actually, he’s out now.” Scott, being Scott, looks sympathetic and tries to pat Derek down for injuries.

Derek, being Derek, finds the energy to snarl at Scott, and then plops said ass down on the edge of the hole and looks…well, he’s pale and a little sweaty from wolfsbane drugging, but otherwise he looks surprisingly good for a guy who’s been held captive in somebody’s basement for the better part of a day. “Stiles. Seriously.”

“Yeah, I know, _seriously_ , this is ridiculous. This is the fifth time this semester, and I could’ve sworn that we had a rule you weren’t allowed to date anybody one of us didn’t already know,” Stiles says. 

He checks his hands again for blood smears, and when he sees mostly-clean fingers, he goes back to texting, only to hear a rustle in the corner. Rolling his eyes, Stiles shifts the phone to his other hand and pulls out his blowgun, and pops the witch with another dose of salt and angelica powder. 

“Stiles!” Scott yelps. He goes off a few paces and checks on the witch, then winces. “Come on, at this rate you’re going to kill her.”

“So?” Derek says.

Scott opens his mouth, face screwing up with earnest dismay, and then pauses. Sensing the lack of righteous speeches, Stiles frowns and looks up again.

“Wait, but he didn’t break the rule,” Scott says, looking back at Stiles. “Remember? That’s my TA from my ethics class.”

Stiles looks at the witch again. “Well, damn, there’s some irony from you, and also, educator again? Maybe we should just ban Derek from going near schools or any institute of learning—”

“I didn’t even want to go out with her,” Derek snaps, scratching at the blood dried to his leg. “I was just being nice because _somebody_ kept talking about she had a crush on me and she could really use a friend after her bad break-up, which turned out to be less a break-up and more like a homicide—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m really sorry, I swear, I had _no_ idea,” Scott says. “She was always really nice to the class.”

“See, this is why I think I’m cursed,” Derek says, after staring in mingled disbelief and disgust at Scott.

Who sighs and then offers a hand to Derek that Derek bats away with another snarl as he gets up. “Derek, come on, you’re not cursed,” Scott says. “You just have…really bad luck—”

“Oh, my God,” Stiles says. He stares blankly at his half-composed text, then jerks his head up to look at the suddenly-wary pair of werewolves standing in front of him. “Oh, my _God_ , Derek, you’re actually right for once! We’ve never checked for curses! Oh, my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. I am so slacking, I swear, I don’t know why, but hang on, let me just get Lydia on the phone and we’ll get right on that.”

Derek presses his lips together, then shifts just the tiniest bit away from Stiles. “I already regret this,” he mutters.

* * *

The first step to testing any proper hypothesis is to gather evidence. 

Well, actually, the first step is getting Lydia on board, which is more difficult than it really should be, considering that Stiles is trying to eliminate the whole let’s spend our weekend rescuing Derek problem. “Look, I’m just saying, we won’t know if it’s really just a joke or reality until we sit down and look at the data,” Stiles says. “And we have enough data. We have at least ten data points that I can think of off the top of my head.”

“Ten?” Laura says, coiling up some rope. “How is it my little brother has a more active love life than I do?”

“He can’t have ten,” Peter says, frowning at the bloody rags he’s supposed to be planting in the witch’s house. “He hasn’t been out of the house that many times. The last time we needed toilet paper, I had to literally toss him out the window to make him go to the drugstore.”

“I’m not getting toilet paper when _you’re_ the one who used it all up doing…whatever with that sex magic stuff in the basement with Stiles,” Derek grumps. He’s moved to sitting in the back of Chris Argent’s SUV, his legs hanging over the bumper as he scratches off the blood on his face. “By the way, I’m healing again so I think the wolfsbane’s worn off. If anybody cares.”

“Of course we care, Derek,” Lydia says, still looking skeptically at Stiles. “If we didn’t care, would we have taken over your family and stopped you all from incompetently revenging yourself into oblivion? Also, Stiles, do I have to remind you that not everything is a curse? Your run-ins with Harris? Our lacrosse team’s record? Not a curse. And how many pairs of shoes did I ruin following those up with you?”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “This is _not_ about my magic obsession, Lyds. Which isn’t an obsession if, you know, I’m actually employing it with great success on behalf of the pack.”

“Obsession and success aren’t mutually exclusive,” Lydia points out. She frowns as something pokes her arm, then shifts aside and recrosses her arms over her chest as Allison slides by to drop a duffel bag into the SUV. “All right, you’re clearly not going to let this go, but before we go down another rabbit hole, what signs do we have that this is even unusual?”

“Derek’s last five romantic relationships have all ended in people trying to kill him,” Stiles says. “ _Consecutive_.”

Lydia examines one of her nails, and then purses her lips as she discovers a chip in her manicure. “Out of how many people who want to kill him, whether or not they have a relationship with him?”

“Okay, you know what, just forget I even mentioned it,” Derek mutters. He moves over for Allison’s bag, and then grudgingly pushes out of the SUV as Scott comes up with two more bags of the same size. After a glance around, he digs up a leather jacket from somewhere and shrugs it on, popping the collar to hide his scowl. “Stupid idea, blame the wolfsbane.”

“But all the other people who want to kill him also want to kill all of us!” Stiles says. “The people he dates only want to kill him!”

A slight wrinkle appears on Lydia’s brow. She stops checking her nails. “Well, maybe it’s human error. Maybe he’s doing something.”

“Don’t even,” Derek says to Peter.

“Actually, I was going to point out that the last three haven’t gotten past first dates,” Peter says, brows raised. He hands Derek a bottle of water and then looks vaguely wounded when Derek sniffs it, has Scott sniff it, and only then opens it for a swig. “Even I don’t credit Derek with being _that_ repellently antisocial.”

“Oh, right,” Laura mutters. She takes the bottle from Derek, snaps away his belated grab for it, and then drinks about half of it before glowering at her male relatives. “I don’t get to date because when Derek isn’t down a well, Peter’s pissing off people.”

“Isn’t that reversing it?” Scott says. When everyone looks at him, he blinks hard, more than a little taken aback, and then gestures vaguely. “Because Timmy’s down the well, not Lassie, and Lassie’s a dog, and…and I thought we decided it was racist if we make dog jokes?”

Well, the poor guy always has his radar on and is willing to speak his mind, Stiles has to give his buddy that. He walks over and slings his arm over Scott’s shoulders, and then uses Scott to block Lydia’s way back to her car, just in case she decides to storm back to whatever she’d been doing. 

“But if a werewolf tells a dog joke, is that racist or self-deprecation? Good question, Scotty,” Stiles says. He pauses, then cocks his brow at Lydia. “Lyds. Come on. There’s something funny going on here. Maybe it’s not a curse, but I think there’s enough for us to look into it. I mean, if nothing else, Derek’s running out of creative ways to let us know he’s in a non-metaphorical hole.”

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Chris breaks in, coming up. He eyes them all warily, then grimaces as he holsters his gun. “I really don’t. But I just want to remind you all that we’re running a high homicide count again, and your dad’s going to be upset if the FBI sends another taskforce.”

Stiles and Scott both wince. The FBI’s at least stopped letting Scott’s dad horn in—because seriously, who the hell runs their conflict of interest checks?—but even without the family irritation, it’s a pain in the ass dealing with know-it-all agents who think the local sheriff is some doughnut-eating redneck who thinks protocol is a synonym for conspiracy theory.

Lydia makes a face as well, since now that she’s officially broken it off with Jackson, they actually have to rustle up money for their legal fees. “Fine,” she says. “Fine. Look, we need to deal with this scene first. But after that we’ll sit down and we’ll profile those ten data points, and if there’s a pattern, _then_ we can look into it more. But I don’t want to just start slaughtering goats all over the place and accidentally bewitching teachers, all right?”

“Yeah, no, of course not,” Stiles says. “We’ll do this scientifically and everything.”

“Does it matter that I actually don’t want you to look into it anymore?” Derek says.

“Not really,” Lydia and Stiles say.

Derek sighs. Laura hands him back his water bottle, and as he looks dubiously at the inch of water left in it, she loops her arm over his shoulders. “It’s endangering the whole pack, bro,” she says. “They kind of have to.”

“I mean, look, right now you don’t have to do anything,” Stiles adds, feeling a belated twinge of guilt. Derek _has_ had a shitty ride lately, and he’s a lot more helpful now than when Stiles and Lydia first decided to stop waiting for the resident werewolves to shape up and realized they’d do a better job running the pack themselves. As co-alpha, Stiles wants to reward that sort of improvement curve. “I think I’ve got all the info I need for a preliminary analysis. You just…try not to add any more data points, okay?”

For a second Derek hunches under his sister’s arm and Stiles thinks that the man might just pull his usual growling exit. But then Derek looks around at everybody. His eyes pause on the witch’s doorway, where Peter and Chris are arguing about where to plant the evidence, and then go to Allison, who’s watching them while rubbing at a fresh scrape on her arm.

“Yeah, I’ll work on that,” Derek finally mutters. “I’ll just stay in our basement, how about that?”

“We did want to finish marathoning _Game of Thrones_ ,” Laura says.

Scott frowns. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean…kidnapping, witch, almost died…don’t people get burned up in that?”

“It’s therapeutic,” Derek snaps, and then he twists out from under Laura’s arm and stalks off.

“They’re fictional evil people who get burned up, it’s not the same,” Laura says, pausing for a second. “Also, dragons are cool.”

“But we’re werewolves!” Scott says plaintively.

“Bro, let it go,” Stiles says, hugging Scott as Laura goes after her brother. “Besides, we’ve got work to do. And don’t look at me like that, you’re my best friend. You know I wouldn’t leave you out when there’s personal dirt to be digging up.”

“I’m actually okay with being left out of that, not that you’re going to,” Scott sighs. He looks longingly over his shoulder at Allison, who’s now quizzing her father on what it means to stick the evidence over there instead of over here. Then something occurs to him and he turns back to frown at Stiles again. “Also, wait, I thought you said we already had all the info we need.”

Stiles starts to steer his friend in the opposite direction of the Hales, while lightly patting Scott’s chest in a reassuring manner with his free hand. “Well, because we do. I just…need to figure out where it all is, and put it together.”

* * *

So Stiles starts off with a simple survey of Derek’s last ten romantic entanglements. He boots up his computer and creates a straightforward spreadsheet form for the basic personal details, and then adds in categories for coding purposes. Nothing fancy, just a column for number of dates before the homicide attempt, the stated reason for said attempt, the method, and an extra column for miscellaneous notes.

That’s easy enough. The tricky part is filling it in. Seeing as Stiles co-alphas the pack and all, he’s eventually found out about all ten, but he wasn’t always there in person for the lead-up.

Also, Derek lies.

“Wait, I thought she said she was after him because she was straight-up psycho,” Stiles says.

Erica and Boyd roll their eyes together, and then Erica hops up onto Boyd’s lap so that he can get a better angle on the French tips he’s giving her nails. “Well, yeah, she _was_ a psycho, but it’s not like she just randomly looked at Derek and went, okay, there’s my victim for the day!” Erica says. “Even if that’s as good an explanation as the real one.”

Stiles taps the side of his laptop. “Which is…”

“She needed a boyfriend,” Isaac says, kicking his feet up onto the bench beside Stiles.

“Lahey, let’s not make this more woman-hating than it already is,” Erica says. She looks in frustration at her fingers, which still have wet nails, and then makes an ‘o’ shape with her mouth. And then she nudges Boyd, who obligingly lifts his foot and kicks Isaac’s legs down. “She needed back-up for her showdown with Laura, and when Derek decided he didn’t feel like being won over by her sob story, she decided to kill him instead.”

“This isn’t women-hating,” Stiles says, entering in the information. “Nobody here has anything against the female gender, okay? It just happens that all ten data points are female, but nobody’s saying that that’s causation.”

Allison sighs and tilts her milkshake out of her mouth. “I think if you want to make that argument, you need to stop referring to them as ‘data points.’”

“It’s neutral language!” Stiles hits ‘save’ and then looks up, just in time to catch a couple fries falling off the food-laden tray that Scott is setting down at their booth. “I’m trying to avoid judgment during the evidence collection stage, all right?”

“Yeah, that one’s not flying, o mighty alpha who judges cashiers based on whether they wait for the register to tell them what’s the right amount of change,” Erica says. “Also, you mean ten out of twelve.”

“Look, just because when Lyds and I took over from Laura, we decided you delinquents could keep your wolfy status doesn’t mean that you can—wait. What?” Stiles says. “Twelve?”

He looks from a smirking Erica to an equally surprised Allison, and then, very slowly, following the gradually intensifying vibes of discomfort and guilt, at his best buddy. Scott fidgets with the tray for a few seconds, absently using his reflexes to flick falling cheese sticks onto the half-eaten basket of nachos already on the table. Then he puts that down and scoots in next to Allison.

“I’m pretty sure that that’s Derek’s stuff to tell,” Scott says, a firm, manly set to his jaw.

Stiles looks at him. Allison narrows her eyes and then reaches over and puts her hand on Scott’s arm, right as that jaw starts to wobble.

“Okay, _fine_ , we’ll postpone the whole debate about socially, legally and ethically acceptable loopholes for sharing confidential information when people’s _lives_ are in danger,” Stiles says, slouching down in his seat. He pushes his laptop aside and pulls out his phone and starts typing out a text to Derek. “Which of the _established murdering psychopaths_ was this, and how did I not find out? That should be neutral enough.”

“Um, well,” Scott stammers.

“Well, if you go chronologically, they’re your new five and nine,” Erica says. She puffs at the nails of her right hand, squints at them, and then contorts so that she can lean down, bite a fork off the table with her fangs, and then gingerly pluck it with the middle parts of her fingers and use it to spear a cheese stick. “You and Lyds didn’t know about five because me and Peter got him out, and Derek bribed me with a new leather jacket and Peter with letting him have the whole house for your sexiversary of the day you and Lyds kidnapped him from the hospital and fucked the crazy out of him.”

Isaac starts slowly sinking under the table, a vaguely disgusted expression on his face that doesn’t get in the way of him trying to tug the nacho basket towards him at the same time. Allison opens her mouth, her finger raised to waggle at Erica, who grins and sucks the cheese stick end-first off the fork, and then she just puts her hand over her face and sighs. 

“It was sort of more complicated than that, but I’ve pretty much given up on trying to get you to understand magic and emotional counseling and look, I just asked Derek whether he’d prefer I talk to him or get the story out of you, and he went with not talking to me,” Stiles mutters, looking at Derek’s reply text.

“Did he actually say that, or did you give him a hypothetical that you knew he was going to be grumpy about?” Scott says. Knowing, but not judgmental, because Scott is kind and loving and tolerant of all things, but also, he’s not totally blind about Stiles. Which is both perplexing and wonderful, and one of the many, many reasons they’re friends. “Stiles.”

“Whatever, I can’t talk to you about number nine anyway ‘cause I wasn’t around for that one, I just heard about it from Laura,” Erica says. And then she makes a Broadway production out of looking at Allison.

Who bridles to the point of even showing a flash of irritation when Scott puts a protective arm over her. Then she realizes it’s him and not any of the other men she knows, and she melts into an adoring smile. “Well, I wasn’t there either, and I certainly didn’t get clothes out of it,” she says, still smiling. “If clothes are your going rate.”

“A good leather jacket is something you pass down to your kids,” Erica sniffs. She switches the fork to her other hand as Boyd moves onto clear topcoat. “I think it’s worth a lot more than getting to threaten to shoot Peter whenever he makes fun of you.”

“So _Chris_ was in on number nine?” Stiles translates.

Allison stops smiling and starts looking deeply annoyed, though she lets Scott squeeze them together. She glares at Erica for a few seconds, then reluctantly twists around to meet Stiles’ patient, constant, inquisitive stare.

“I don’t know a lot,” she mutters. “He’s embarrassed about it. I think…I think Dad ran into them at wherever they were going on their date, and…and I think maybe he was there for a date too, and he doesn’t want to talk about it because he’s all weird about, you know, what I think when I’ve _told_ him I’m okay with him getting out there again.”

“Okay, well, I guess I’ll ask him,” Stiles says. He turns back to his laptop and starts adding rows to his spreadsheet, and then he looks up again. “I’m the _nice_ alpha, remember? Lyds just wanted to steal all your guns and books and annotated topographical maps. I’m the one who said we should try bringing you into the fold.”

For a second Allison looks like she’s buying it, and then she smiles at Stiles and it’s her sweet, innocent smile that she pulls out for law enforcement officials not in the know while she’s resetting her taser to ‘knockout.’ “Stiles, blackmailing my dad with having Child Protective Services crash one of our training sessions isn’t nice. Neither is handcuffing him with magically unpickable cuffs while you and Lydia make him sit through an hour-long presentation on how inefficient our family is with hunting bad guys.”

“But it worked,” Stiles says. He moves his leg aside in time to miss Scott’s kick at his shin, and then aims his toes right at the bony part of Scott’s ankle for maximum hurt; werewolf healing doesn’t mean they’re deficient in pain receptors. And being a best friend doesn’t mean letting Allison walk over him, too. “Didn’t it?”

Allison holds up about five seconds longer than Scott would have, and then she makes a face at Stiles. “Well, I’m still friends with you,” she says, picking up her milkshake again. “Just don’t get him more embarrassed than he already is, would you? It took ages just to get him to admit he wanted to start going out with people again, and I’m really tired of coming home to him sitting there and cleaning every gun in the house for the zillionth time.”

“Erica,” Stiles says, just as Erica opens her mouth. He moves his hand in a cut-it gesture and she pouts but goes back to blowing at her nails. “Okay, deal. I won’t embarrass your dad.”

* * *

“I said you didn’t have to talk to me,” Derek says, glowering at Stiles from his basement nest of pillows, sleeping bags, assorted junk food packages and what looks like a very detailed, custom-made plushie of Drogon. “ _You_ said you didn’t have to talk to me.”

“Yeah, well, that was before I found out that you’ve been doing more than your usual degree of unhelpful evasive antihero bullshit,” Stiles says, slipping his bag strap off his shoulder. He takes out his laptop and tosses the bag aside, and then takes a seat on the basement steps. “What’s up with number five and nine, Derek?”

Derek’s hand maybe inches towards the plushie. Then he lifts it and rubs at his face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, as usual,” he says. He continues to do his damnedest to let those stubbled, model-perfect cheekbones out-testosterone his surroundings, and then he points an accusing claw. “And what’s she doing here?”

“Well, contrary to what you seem to think, I take my job as alpha just as seriously as Stiles. If there’s a problem here, I want to be involved in dealing with it from start to finish,” Lydia says. She sits on the steps next to Stiles and then hands Stiles a glass of lemonade. Which isn’t so much of a hospitable gesture as an excuse for her to swipe Stiles’ laptop and start recoding his spreadsheet. “Also, Derek, if you really have been rescued more times than we know about, I’m honestly concerned. We were both very skeptical when you said that you’d had enough therapy—”

“Because I have, and I’m fine, and I am not keeping you guys in the dark because I feel guilty about imposing on you,” Derek snaps. “I’m doing it because I just don’t want you to _know_.”

Lydia looks at him for a few seconds. Her brows tick up. Derek raises his brows right back, and then he flops into the nest, sending a bag of potato chips crinkling into the air. He snags the bag, slits the end with a claw, and then starts munching on chips while he stares at the paused TV screen. She sighs and puts her hands up into her hair, pulling it back from her face, and he passive-aggressively munches even louder.

“Well, I hate to admit it, but you’re right,” she mutters to Stiles. She combs her fingers a few times through her hair, then drops one arm to rest the elbow on her knee. She uses that hand to prop up her chin as Stiles slides the laptop back onto his thighs. “Not about the hypothetical curse, which is still hypothetical till proven. About the fact that something’s wrong here.”

“I said I was fine,” Derek snarls. Somehow, even through a handful of chips, it comes out with genuine menace.

Of course, Stiles pretty much got used to genuine menace the day he sifted through his father’s unsolved homicide files and realized what was _really_ going on in town. “Derek. Hiding the fact that you’re suicidal isn’t any better.”

Derek turns his head. He’s sunk so far into the blankets that he looks weirdly disembodied, nothing but a grouchy set of eyebrows and some bared fangs floating above a tangle of fuzzy primary colors. “Just because I don’t feel like telling you everything doesn’t mean I’m suicidal.”

“Fine, blindly self-destructive,” Lydia says, rubbing at her temple.

“I’m not—” Then Derek squishes down so much that he’s a spiky black fringe on the red blanket. “Whatever. I just don’t see why you have to bug me now. What, did you finally get bored of screwing the rest of my family?”

“Now, Derek, you know sex isn’t the reason why Laura and I were won over,” Peter says, magically appearing, as he does whenever being insulted, at the top of the stairs. He saunters down, attempts to sniff Lydia’s hair, gets batted away, and settles for cuddling up behind Stiles. Steals Stiles’ lemonade while he’s at it. “Though it’s a very persuasive continuing benefit, don’t get me wrong.”

Lydia rolls her eyes and reaches over. She’s just skritching Peter’s neck, not really clawing into him like she would if she was truly annoyed. Stiles can tell from the way Peter goes all feline-boneless and shoves the bony bridge of his nose into the back of Stiles’ head, and then doesn’t care when Stiles repeatedly elbows him in his stupidly genetically-perfect abdomen.

“Whatever,” Derek’s hair responds. “It’s great that we didn’t end up going with your dumb idea of killing each other for power, Peter, but I don’t need details.”

Peter purrs for a few more seconds, then sluggishly recalls himself to his sarcasm. Also, shifts over so at least his nose is slotting behind Stiles’ ear. “I wasn’t about to waste them on an unappreciative cretin like you,” he says. “But I’m also not going to keep covering up for the sake of your pride. We finally have alphas who go through the trouble of regular mental-health check-ins—”

“Do you have blood under your nails?” Lydia says, leaning behind Stiles, a frown in her voice. “Weren’t you getting the groceries, Peter? Please tell me you didn’t kill somebody for their parking space.”

“No, of course not, I killed them because their cart had the exact ingredients you need for a banshee-silencing spell,” Peter says. He pulls his head away from Stiles, then sighs. “Fine, I didn’t even kill them, they’re knocked out in the car trunk out of courtesy to McCall’s morals and back to my point. Derek. It’s beyond embarrassing when Chris Argent is rescuing you from being roofied. Our family has survived fire, hunters, a pack of rogue alphas, a darach, and at least twenty other species of psychotic supernatural killers, yours truly not included. If you’re going to die, at least try and—”

“Thank you for the pep talk, Peter. Getting shamed for other people trying to kill me is definitely going to make me want to live,” Derek says, grudgingly slewing around. He glances at Stiles and Lydia, then slumps so that he’s glaring at the ceiling. “Fine, let’s get this over with. Who the hell is number five supposed to be?”

Stiles blinks hard, and then hastily tabs till he’s in the right row on the spreadsheet. “The one where you bought Erica a leather jacket after.”

Derek’s brows twitch. He’s still annoyed, of course, and also, Peter and Lydia are there, so obviously Derek’s wary. But on top of that, for a second he looks almost…furtive. Not quite embarrassed—he doesn’t seem like he’s terrified of whatever he’s going to have to explain—but definitely related to that.

“Oh, him,” he finally says.

Lydia flicks her eyes to Stiles, who shrugs. She looks back at Derek, while clutching at Peter’s nape, and Stiles can tell _that_ because Peter burrows his face in between Stiles’ shirt-collar and neck and starts making little apologetic-puppy noises, like he tore up the couch or something but he’s just so adorable. Which…is sort of related to the feeling that that actually triggers in Stiles, the same way Derek’s expression a second ago is related to embarrassment, and anyway, Stiles is just glad he has his laptop back and over him.

“Yeah, so, that was back when Jackson was being shady,” Derek goes on.

“Which shady,” Lydia says, in a long-suffering but slightly edged tone.

Derek glances at her, a flicker of nervousness going over his face, but when she doesn’t do anything except squeeze Peter’s neck, he shrugs. “The shady where you thought he was sneaking off with that girl from the all-girls school, and it turned out he was actually going with her to get stamina potions,” he says. “You had me following him, remember, and I ran into this guy while I was checking out the witch’s school. He was assistant coach for their basketball team and I didn’t want to get arrested for perving on teenagers, so I flirted with him and we went on two dates and then it turned out that he was a psycho.”

Stiles types as Derek talks, but Lydia only got halfway through changing his coding, so he has to stop and fix the rest of it. Then he catches up to where he was. “What kind of psycho?” 

“Homicidal,” Derek says.

“It is literally worse than pulling teeth with you,” Stiles says, looking up. “I mean, if I pulled teeth, at least I’d have the satisfaction of visual evidence of my progress. Whereas this whole one-word asshole act, Derek?”

“He was an incubus,” Peter breaks in. Lydia eases off on him and Peter straightens up, mostly so that he can peer over Stiles’ shoulder and make interested noises at the spreadsheet, but also so that he can at least provide the info for the ‘stated reason’ cell. “Contrary to popular belief, incubi don’t need to constantly feed off sex. They’re more like snakes, you know, one good meal can stretch out for months or even years. And werewolves, given that we have supernatural strength, are preferred.”

Lydia reaches over and corrects a typo by mashing her fingers over Stiles’ and making two more typos, and then she sniffs when Stiles flicks her hands away. “Why Derek and not Jackson?”

“He didn’t like blonds,” Derek says, shrugging. “That’s why I called Erica and Peter. I figured Peter would distract him and he’d totally ignore Erica, since she’s got two strikes for not getting his attention.”

“So…you used your uncle as bait?” Stiles says, while Peter makes self-righteous noises behind him.

“No, I called him and I told him it was an incubus and _he_ made the decision to come over and laugh at me in person,” Derek says. He eats a last chip and then licks the salt off his fingers before crumpling up the empty chip bag. 

And okay, Stiles pauses and stares for a second. Derek might be the most frustrating asshole of a werewolf in an extremely asshole werewolf family, but watching him occasionally helps to make up for the deficit. It’s not just Stiles either; Lydia chews her lip a little, and seeing that helps too. She refuses to admit it to anyone including Stiles, but she’s been a bit brittle since she finally gave Jackson the boot.

Then she looks at Peter, who shrugs. “Well, while I’d previously have taken offense, I think now I’m honestly relieved to see that he’s learning _something_ about psychological tactics,” he says, and then his voice gets all purring and smarmy. “Put it down to your influence, my dear alphas.”

“Okay, then,” Stiles says, as Lydia holds up her hand and pointedly curls her fingers to show off her long, perfect nails. He tries not to squirm as Peter shudders at her and, incidentally, sticks his nose back behind Stiles’ ear. “Moving on. Number nine. Chris Argent to the rescue.”

Derek goes back to sulking in the blanket nest. “Do we really have to do this?”

“Well, do you really want to spend the rest of your life sexually frustrated in your basement? I hate to tell you, man, but you’ve definitively aged out of that,” Stiles says, exasperated. He starts to go on, almost jabs his elbow into the keyboard and thereby deletes all the new entries, and irritably yanks his arms down so he can save and close the laptop. “Look, all psycho ex jokes aside, I am actually, genuinely concerned here. If we keep going at this rate, just by the law of probabilities, one of these jokers might actually kill you, and that’s just not cool.”

“That’s not how probabilities work,” Derek says.

Lydia folds her arms across her chest. “You dropped out of high school.”

“I finished later, and also, I don’t know about you, but _we_ did probabilities starting in middle school,” Derek says, raking one hand back through his hair. “Probability means random. These aren’t random.”

“Well, which just ups the odds of you becoming the prettiest corpse in Beacon Hills since Jackson de-kanimaed himself via dying!” Stiles says, throwing up his hands. “Derek, damn it, we’re trying to save your life here! Do you actually have a problem with that?”

Derek opens his mouth and pulls down his brows and gets all posed in fantasy-biker boy style to protest (because of course he’s still rocking the leather indoors), and then he pauses. His head twitches forward a few times, probably from sheer momentum of irritation, before he abruptly slumps down again.

“No, okay, it’s just…they all fucking sucked to have happen in the first place, and have to keep calling you to deal with, and why do you think I didn’t want to tell you?” he mutters.

Lydia puts her head down in one hand. “I knew we should’ve went with another year of sessions.”

Derek stiffens. The annoyance in his eyes is shaded with more than a little real panic, an expression Stiles knows intimately since he pretty much woke up to that in the mirror every day for the first three months after he and Lydia declared themselves co-alphas, and Stiles grimaces and prepares to cut Lydia off. She’s already raised her head, blood-sensing shark in a banshee body that she is.

But instead of saying anything, she just looks at Derek for a few seconds, her lips tightening. “Fine,” she says. “We said that was up to you. But dying, Derek? Not up to you, that’s not the kind of pack we are, no matter what philosophy tip of the day Scott comes up with. So let’s just get the analysis done, and Stiles and I can figure out if it’s a real curse or not, and then you can give back the crown for schizophrenic relationships. How does that sound?”

To his credit, Derek looks relieved but doesn’t immediately say anything. Stiles isn’t sure if that’s because he spotted the submerged self-hating trap in Lydia’s words, but anyway, Derek just grunts. “Laura was getting on my nerves about never going out, so I went and signed up for one of those stupid dating apps. And shut up, Peter, that’s why we were at the damn bar, so we’d be in public and be using common sense safety tips and it _still_ ended up going to hell.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Peter says mildly, resting his chin on Stiles’ shoulder. “Come to think of it, Chris hasn’t either.”

Derek looks weirdly torn. His face seesaws between tense humiliation and…and sort of a vicious kind of satisfaction, and if anybody still thinks that _Peter_ got all the vengeance kicks in the family, well, they’re beyond hope. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure he was there because he was using the same app. It was some scam to trick guys into coming there so they and the bartender could knock you out and drag you in the back and use you in some eternal youth whatever.”

“So why’d you get knocked out and Chris didn’t?” Stiles says. He opens up his laptop and doesn’t bother to look at Derek. “Random assumption, let me know if I’m wrong here.”

“They scheduled back to backs, and he’s a paranoid nutcase who shows up forty minutes early to find all the exits of places where he goes for dates,” Derek mutters. He pauses to rummage in the blankets, then comes up with a bottle of water that he swigs from. “He actually looked really surprised that it was a set-up. Left his gun in the car and everything. All he had was this tiny penknife in his shoe.”

Peter makes a noise of dawning comprehension. “That _would_ be terribly embarrassing for the man. No wonder he won’t even flash a bullet when I bring it up.”

Lydia has her face in her hand again. “Stiles, when we’re done here, remind me we need to check whether Chris is having guilt-induced hallucinations again. He’s been very nice to Peter lately, that’s not normal.”

“Yep, I’ll add it to the to-do list,” Stiles says over Peter’s wounded noise.

“How many more of these do we need to go through?” Derek asks, testy and tired at the same time.

“No, we’re done _here_ ,” Stiles says, saving and closing his laptop again. “She meant, done with the whole analysis and resolution thing. Speaking of which…I gotta come up with some macros and filtering rules and histograms and whatever, so keep on with not getting kidnapped, okay? This might take a little bit.”

Derek looks over at them, and then surveys his basement kingdom. He pulls himself up a few inches, reaches over and digs out the remote, and starts up the TV again right on a torture scene of gratuitously naked beautiful people. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

* * *

Lydia insists on sitting down with Stiles and plowing through the data together, even though it’s just a regular spreadsheet and only one person can work on it at a time. “Don’t look so shocked,” she says, changing his coding tags for the nth time. “We all know you’re brilliant at insights, Stiles, but when it comes to anything more rigorous than anecdotal evidence, you have the attention span of a Red Bull addict.”

“You know that Red Bull has negative interactions with my ADD,” Stiles says, surreptitiously kicking his bookbag so his emergency can isn’t showing. He takes back the laptop, for the nth plus one time, and reverses her changes. “And even the FDA recognizes that sometimes the initial evidence is so overwhelming that it would be a crime to hold back a potential cure, and anyway, don’t you have some school committee or board or other excuse to prey on transfer students?”

She gives him a look like she hasn’t missed or been late to the last three pack meetings because she was busy welcoming some poor cannon-fodder newbie. Stiles snorts and switches to his output spreadsheet, and looks at her like yeah, he isn’t actively crushing his thin veneer of social acceptability for the sake of her heart anymore, but she knows damn well he still cares about her and not in the sense of, having an awesome partner for those co-alpha threesomes when Peter or Laura start getting attention-starved. Because werewolves are surprisingly okay about being co-opted so long as they have an outlet for all that supernatural energy, and also, get their weekly dose of primal physical affirmation of affection.

Anyway. “Are you done being a vapid judging asshole?” Lydia asks, idly tossing her hair with one hand, showing off her shampoo-commercial-worthy shine.

“I don’t know, are you done mourning the vapid judging asshole who was emotionally abusing you even though we straightened out his stupid entitled rich boy identity crisis about not dying in his pregnant mom?” Stiles says. He waits out her visible impulse to just lash back at him, and then looks down to adjust one of his formulas. “You know, I get that he was a huge part of your life and all, but…”

Lydia’s stiff and defensive for another second, and then she…doesn’t exactly crumple, she’s too strong for that, but she definitely bends that backbone a few degrees. She sighs and leans into Stiles’ arm. “I should’ve cut off the rebound sex after the first few,” she admits. “Well, all I can say is, you get into a groove, and for some reason they just keep referring hot transfers our way, even with the district’s mortality rates. And now Derek’s a one-man psycho magnet, yes, Stiles, I get it, I’ve been slacking on the alpha business.”

And now Stiles feels a little squirmy with guilt, despite a good few months of pent-up resentment about having to cover for her. It’s probably how, no matter how mad he gets at her, she can just switch that scathing tone on herself and he remembers that under her glossy exterior, she’s the only one in town who was willing to get down and dirty with him to just make everybody stop killing each other. “Yeah, well, better late than never,” he mutters. “As long as we can nip this in the bud before my dad gets wind of it, I forgive you for all the times you’ve had your phone off lately.”

“Is he giving you problems again?” she asks, before he can redirect the conversation to the spreadsheet. When Stiles doesn’t immediately answer, Lydia frowns and then scoots closer to stare him in the eye, like it hasn’t been nearly a year since he stopped getting flustered into truth-telling via ultra-close proximity to her. “Stiles. You swore, if your dad started up with this whole, let’s just run pack business through the police again, you were going to—”

“He’s not. We’re fine. We’re good, okay, I even packed him lunch today,” Stiles says. And then pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through his texts when she continues to look skeptical. “See? He texted me about it. _Nice try, son, can tell the cheese is vegan_.”

Lydia arches a brow, but backs off. Her eyes flick to the laptop screen, then come back up to Stiles’ face as she impatiently taps a nail against the side of the laptop. “Well? What do we have?”

“Well, according to my coding, we have…no discernable backstory that links all of these incidents together. That is, I don’t see any overarching reason why they’d line up for a go at Derek, there’s no vendettas or secret rogue hunter target lists or anything like that,” Stiles says. He holds up his hand, hearing her inhale, and then switches to a third spreadsheet. “And if we go by _your_ coding, then Derek’s semi-unpleasant attitude still only accounts for three of them. And two of those probably were already planning to hurt him in some way before that, he just convinced them to make it permanent.”

She looks at the spreadsheet, her hand rising and falling as she decides and then changes her mind about fiddling at the data. Finally she pushes that hair back into her hair, but so that she can absently tuck the strands behind her ear, the way she does when she’s doing heavy-duty calculating. “We really did miss something,” she says. “Even if there’s no curse, and it’s just bad luck…we missed some kind of flag here, Stiles.”

“I know, why do you think I’m being so anal-retentive about digging into this?” Stiles says. Which earns him a sharp look from Lydia; Stiles almost covers with a joke before remembering it’s her and not another pack member, and instead he sighs and puts his hands behind him so that he can slump on them. “We’ve been making fun of it forever, and we’re supposed to be the good alphas who don’t let this sort of dumb shit slide because of outdated lycanthrope misfit traditions and whatever. My dad—”

Lydia doesn’t move or say anything, but her attention palpably ratchets up. Stiles grimaces at himself, then pulls his hands forward so he can flop into the back of the couch. “It’s not like before, okay, really, he’s finally gotten the point that we can’t actually convert every single cop in town to believers,” he mutters, rubbing at his face.

“If only because Scott buys that wholesale, and then ends up getting poisoned by secretly freaked-out deputies,” Lydia agrees.

“He’s just—I mean, he’s my dad, I think it’s not an unreasonable reaction to ask why your still not-voting-age son has to save the town via homicide and sex,” Stiles says. And then he drops his head against the top of the couch so that he can stare at the ceiling. “It’d just…be a lot easier if he went back to taking that out on Deaton and Morrell and Scott’s dad.”

“Do you want us to talk to him again?” Lydia asks.

Stiles looks at her. “And what are we going to cover that the five Powerpoints and eleven hundred pages of supplementary material we’ve already put together for him haven’t?”

“Well, that neither of us think Peter and Laura are full-time long-term relationship material, Peter’s actually much happier as a sidepiece so he can non-hypocritically judge all the stable couples, Laura’s actively in the market, and Chris isn’t interested in either of us, he just has grabby-hands issues from his former life as an entitled hunter?” Lydia suggests.

“Lyds, I appreciate the support, but Dad…look, I think he just needs time. He’s still working on not reaching for his gun every time one of the Hales knocks on our door,” Stiles says, tugging his laptop up his legs. “Anyway, he does get that Peter and Laura are…are special circumstances. He just keeps giving me this talk about not missing my chances, and making sure I take care of myself, and blah blah I almost think he might settle for me fake-dating somebody, just so he can see that I’m doing semi-normal teenager stuff. And speaking of.”

“Yes, Derek,” Lydia says, scrunching her hand in her hair. “Right. Well. If there’s no reasonable non-curse explanation for why these keep happening, and they’re happening way too close together, then…all right, we need to check for curses.”

Stiles grins. Not because he’s having a moment of schadenfreude or is otherwise deriving enjoyment from Derek’s very real suffering. No, he just really…gets excited when he thinks he’s solved a problem, that’s all.

“This doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means that I’m allowing for the possibility. And we do owe it to Derek to rule out all reasons,” Lydia adds, shooting Stiles a warning look.

“I don’t know why you’re so resistant to this curse idea,” Stiles says. “It’s like you think we’re going to be worse off if it turns out to be the real reason. If it’s a curse, then that’s going to be a cinch to fix.”

Lydia doubles down on the warning look, and then she pulls her phone out and starts texting. He’s close enough to see that she’s messaging her dry cleaner to expect a heavy week, and also, inquiring as to whether the bulk rate option is still available.

“Says the man who wears nothing he doesn’t mind throwing out,” she mutters, getting up. “I’ll call Laura and Erica, you call Peter and Scott.”

“Hey, I’m just being realistic about how often we end up with body disposal issues,” Stiles says, saving the files. “So…we’re not going to call Derek before we get him?”

Lydia looks at him. “Stiles. We’re better alphas because we’re more efficient, not because we’re nicer.”

“And ladies and gentlemen, Lydia Martin is back in the game!” Stiles says, giving her a thumbs up. “All right, let’s go hunt us a curse-removal subject.”

* * *

Derek is being less than cooperative. 

“Because how am I supposed to know that it’s you two when I get darted and rolled into the back of somebody’s car like it’s Friday night?” he demands. “And you, get out of my face, for the last time, you do _not_ check for a concussion by sticking your tongue down somebody’s throat.”

“You know, that’s a very good question,” Stiles says, watching Derek pry an overenthusiastic Erica off his back. Then he turns to Scott and Scott’s predictable unsanctioned back-up. “Seeing as we deliberately didn’t call Allison or her dad in order to avoid the whole hunter trap confusion mistake.”

Allison glances briefly up from the dart pistol she’s reloading, and then she frowns as the loading pin sticks on her. “Stiles, I get it, and once again, I am sorry that my family’s been full of genocidal assholes since the Second World War, but also I thought you didn’t want to have any more pack arrested for public brawls?”

“We’re werewolves, not Luddites,” Peter drawls. He’s leaning against the side of the car with his arms folded over his chest, smirking every time that Derek thinks he’s got Erica off and starts to walk away, only to find that she’s sucked in a different limb. “We’re perfectly capable of operating firearms.”

“You just don’t feel like it,” Allison says. She looks at him as the loading pin finally snaps into place. Then she raises the gun and darts Erica without looking away.

Peter’s brows rise in genuine, if passing, admiration. Then he scoots aside so that Laura can slip over and grab Erica before the other woman passes out face-first in the grass. Laura is considerably less impressed, and in one smooth movement, she plucks the dart from Erica’s arm, tosses the woman over one shoulder, and then flicks the dart so that it lands between Derek and Allison.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Laura says. She eyes Allison for long enough to bring Scott around from where he’d been helping Lydia dump out bags of dried herbs, and then she swivels to face her brother. “Because _somebody_ refuses to come when he’s called.”

“Laura, it is not calling me if you drive up when I’m in the middle of something and just tell me to get in and don’t look back,” Derek says. He jerks at his coat till it’s sitting straight across his shoulders, and then frowns and rubs at where Erica’s fingers had started to permanently ripple the leather. “And don’t even start with the bizarre stories that Peter comes up with when he doesn’t even have to. If you’re picking me up at a burger joint, the cashier does _not_ need an alibi for whatever you’re doing for the next six hours.”

“You never know who might be pulled in for interviews,” Peter says when everyone looks at him. “Law enforcement is very thorough these days.”

Derek stares at him, and then gives himself a shake that’s half-irritable, half-incredulous. Then he turns around and he draws his breath for some incredibly scathing rant, only to pause. His eyes narrow as he takes in the contents of the backyard. Werewolves, Stiles, Lydia, crates of fresh and dried herbs, sampling kit, and a kiddie pool of steeping herb-infused water.

“See, this is why we went with Scott’s way for once,” Laura says, looking at him. “If we’d just walked up and said, hey, Derek, the alphas want to check you out for curses, were you honestly going to leave that burger?”

“Well, to be fair, it’s not like five minutes either way was going to make any difference,” Stiles has to admit.

“It’s okay, I grabbed his food while they were putting him in the car,” Scott says. He starts off, then realizes he still has herb dust all over his hands and stops to wipe them off on his jeans. So he helpfully hooks his chin at the car. “It’s the white bag next to my backpack.”

For a second, Derek looks at them all as if he’s only just realized that his life isn’t, in fact, your average mundane nine-to-five and then wasting your night with beer and checking Facebook updates. And then he snorts and scowls and crouches down to give the kiddie pool a rather vicious poke, considering it hasn’t done anything to him yet. “Actually, I might have. Seeing as I’m not self-destructive, whatever you all seem to think about me. So you really think there’s a curse?”

“We think we’d better check,” Lydia says. She plops a floating probe into the water, squints at it, and then pulls out another bag of rock salt and starts pouring it in. “Dysfunctional family antics aside—and I _will_ be looking at your perpetuation of each other’s PTSD—”

Coming back from putting Erica in the car, Laura winces, catches her brother vibing a little smugly, and just stops herself from kicking a tuft of ripped-up grass onto the back of his coat

“—we did want to rule it out sooner rather than later. Stiles plotted out the timeline and it looks like incidents are getting closer together,” Lydia finishes.

Derek presses his lips together, but otherwise doesn’t show too much besides long-suffering resignation. On the other hand, Laura blinks hard in surprise and then backs up a little, pulling her phone out and checking her calendar. Peter also looks surprised and takes a break from smirking to tick off his fingers in a non-linear way; Stiles has to stare at him for a couple seconds to figure out that Peter’s working out something according to the lunar cycle.

“Oh, no, really?” Allison says, looking and sounding genuinely dismayed. She and the Hales aren’t exactly close, but she and Scott are madly in love partly because she’s weirdly sympathetic to the hassle that is existing as a werewolf. “Should we rearrange the patrols, or start up a special watch, or—”

“Okay, hey, like my co-alpha here says, let’s not jump to conclusions before we do the actual testing,” Stiles hastily says. He keeps an eye on the twitch that’s developing in Derek’s cheek as he slips his laptop back into its case, and then picks up the specially-modified ebook reader he keeps for his curse-breaking files (because if it blows up, at least he doesn’t lose his collections of painstakingly scanned and digitally-enhanced non-curse-breaking references). “We’re not sure he’s cursed. But there’s definitely some statistical anomalies we want to look into. And curse-testing’s easy.”

Derek looks up at him, and then looks down at the kiddie pool. “Right,” he says. “So…what does this involve, exactly?”

“Well, we need samples of your hair, nails, claws, skin, and all bodily emissions,” Lydia says. She shakes out the last of the salt before turning around and picking up a large red-and-white plastic case, which she then hands to Derek. “Read the labels, use the sanitary wipes to sterilize the body part before you take the sample. The herbs need to steep for at least another fifteen minutes, so you can go inside and get these done while we’re finishing up set-up.”

“Okay. That’s not bad.” Then Derek flips up the latch and starts reading the labels on the small plastic vials inside the case. “Wait. Wait, are you se—”

Lydia looks up. “All. Bodily. Emissions.”

“So, um, if you need…no, no, I’m not offering to go _in_ with you,” Scott says, holding up his hands as both Allison and Derek turn to stare at him. “I’m just saying, Mom’s a nurse, remember, so she’s told me a couple tricks she uses to help out patients. You know. If you think you might have trouble or something. Which is totally normal. Everybody gets nervous.”

“If that were true, we wouldn’t have to buy deodorizing spray in bulk,” Peter mutters into his hand.

Derek slaps the case lid down, visibly debates with himself for a few seconds, and then sets his shoulders back. “Thanks, but I can handle this kind of thing without you, Scott,” he says. He starts to get up, and then looks at the pool. “But then what? Why is this here?”

“That’s for the ritual cleansing,” Stiles says. “So the thing is, with some curses, you’re not sure they’re there till you’ve removed them. And anyway, it can’t hurt.”

Derek looks at him, and then at the water. The man edges over and leans forward to peer into the pool. He sniffs twice, his expression getting sourer and sourer in between. “Cleansing. Like a baptism or something?”

“Except it’s nondenominational, so don’t worry, we’re not secretly converting you or anything.” Stiles starts swiping through his reader for the right text. “But yeah, you’re gonna have to strip down and get all the way in there.”

Behind Derek, Laura and Peter suddenly straighten up and flank out. That gets Scott’s attention and he frowns, then pivots to brace his feet as Derek takes a jerky step back from the water.

“I have to get in there,” Derek says. He sniffs again, and then jabs his finger at the pool. “I have to take off my clothes and get in there.”

“Well, unless you want to salt-cure your leather coat,” Lydia says tartly. “You usually don’t have a problem with losing your clothes.”

“Usually because I’m too busy trying to not die to worry about being naked,” Derek snaps. “You put garlic in there.”

Stiles blinks. “Yeah? It’s a well-known evil repellant, and it’s not like you’re a vampire.”

“But I’m a _werewolf_ ,” Derek says. “I don’t want to walk around smelling like that for the rest of the week, and believe me, I’ll smell it no matter how much soap I dump on myself.”

Lydia and Stiles look at each other, and then they turn back to Derek, who hunches up and ducks his head, but who looks no more likely to just drop it. Behind him, Laura sighs, and Peter starts cracking his knuckles.

“Derek,” Stiles finally says. “Derek. Buddy. You’re not supposed to be out in public anyway, since God knows you manage to get laid when you’re lurking around the high school, covered in blood and looking like the highlights of a public service announcement warning against serial killers. Speaking of, why were you out getting a burger anyway?”

“Laura can’t cook and Peter refuses to do it unless one of you is coming over,” Derek says. “Also, you just said we don’t know if there’s really a curse. So why can’t you just do the other tests first?”

Lydia starts to rub at her forehead. “Derek, are you actually suggesting that we leave you potentially curse-ridden just because you don’t want to smell bad?”

“It’s not about smelling bad, it’s about smelling like garlic!” Derek says, clutching his coat to him like he’s trying to merge with it. “Have _you_ tried it?”

Stiles frowns. “Wait, so you have?”

“Okay, bro, I have to just step in here. As your big sister, and someone who is really, really done with watching you get tortured, you need to do this,” Laura says, as well as does.

She comes over and puts her hands on Derek’s shoulders. Well. Tries. Just before they come down, Derek twists away, and then turns and snarls at her. So Laura shoves him in the shoulder. He shoves back, they both wolf out, and then it’s a good thing that Stiles has long since put up privacy wards around every pack member’s backyard, because the two of them are not being in the slightest bit careful about rolling around in the grass wrestling with each other.

“Peter,” Lydia sighs, looking at the sky. Then, still looking, she holds up one finger. “Allison will break that hand and we won’t see a problem with it.”

“I was just taking her suggestion,” Peter says, wounded, withdrawing his sneaky hands from Allison’s holster as Allison yelps and then clings to Scott. He studies his brawling niece and nephew for a second, popping a last knuckle, and then wades in with a shake of his head and totally illegal knee to Derek’s kidney.

“Guys,” Scott says. “Don’t you think there’s a better way to do this?”

Stiles is about to point out that first of all, Scott is very, very late with his conscientious objection, and then he gets…sort of distracted by Laura hauling Derek’s coat over his head while his arms are still stuck in the sleeves, and Peter’s hanging onto Derek’s belt-loops. So Derek’s shirt rides up with his coat, and the muscles underneath are all bunched and twitching with effort, with nice little gleams of sweat highlighting them, and there’s a reason Derek is literally fatally attractive.

“Um. Guys. Stiles, Lydia, _guys_ ,” Scott is saying.

Lydia’s tilted her head to the side and is also checking Derek out, although she seems to be more fascinated with how his ass clenches under some unreasonably tight jeans as he kicks madly at Peter’s head. “Hmmm?”

“We’re here to help Derek?” Scott says, although from the way his tone sinks, he knows he’s waging a losing war. Which is basically his whole game, so Scott steps forward and snaps his fingers in front of both Stiles and Lydia’s faces. “With the potential cursing? Because we wouldn’t put him through this much trouble if it wasn’t serious?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, of course,” Stiles says, going back to his e-reader. “Though honestly, Derek, we’re going easy on you. Every time _I_ have to get dunked, we gotta do it in ice-water, and here you’re just bitching about a little garlic powder. We’re even letting it warm up to body temp for you.”

“Laura, Peter,” Lydia says, her usual barely-tolerant expression returning. “We need the _other_ samples first, so there’s no need to take him all the way down. And yes, Peter, I would consider that contamination.”

The older Hales reluctantly withdraw, Laura toting her brother’s coat like a trophy as she gives his hair a passing ruffle. “Derek, you gotta stop,” she says, and something about it makes Derek shut up and look strangely at her. “We made it this far. There’s no way you’re biting it just because of some psycho ex, okay? We get mini-apocalypses and power-crazed rogue packs, not that kind of shit. That shit happens to other people.”

“What about Peter’s ex who showed up last month?” Derek snarls. But he’s mumbling, slouching in his slightly mangled tee and jeans.

“Shame on you, Derek, such a cheap shot. You’re supposed to be better than me, aren’t you?” Peter says, tsking. He has Derek’s shoes and socks, and he fastidiously tucks the socks into the shoes before flipping the pair over and over in his hands, grinning over them. “Besides. She was _also_ a maniac who was systematically wiping out high school sports teams. Hardly the same.”

Lydia thwaps Peter on the arm, and then takes Derek’s shoes from him while he’s busy whining. She tucks them under her arm as she walks around Derek, retrieves the sample case that he dropped in the scuffle, and then brings that over to put on his lap. 

“Look, if you honestly are happy the way you are, then we won’t do this,” she says, looking at him. Then she points his shoes at Stiles in a very threatening way, without looking away from Derek. “That said, we’ll also have to segregate you from the rest of the pack till we’re sure that whatever the problem isn’t contagious, and you’re going to have to redirect some of your car maintenance budget to covering your rescue costs.”

“Lydia,” Laura says, a beat before Scott can. “That’s really—”

“You want to babysit him on your own time, we’re not gonna stop you, but if he wants to go down, that’s fair so long as he doesn’t take everybody else with him,” Stiles says, reluctantly tagging onto Lydia’s line. He gets the whole free will thing, sure, but de-cursing is just so much more efficient. “Every time we go get him, it’s not just him who ends up getting dinged up.”

“Yeah, I know, I know, and…and no, I’m not happy with this,” Derek says irritably, waving off his sister. He looks at Lydia and then at Stiles, doing that thing where he flips from grumpy wolf to this insanely intense guy who’s only annoyed because he has this terrible habit of nearly killing himself to make good on his word. “Are you kidding? No, I’m not, and…and fine, I’ll do these…samples, and the bath, and just don’t blame me when…”

Then he clams up. Looks a little weird for a second, almost like he thought he was going too far. Which is not the kind of thought that is in Derek’s usual repertoire, but Stiles doesn’t dwell on it too long. Maybe the situation is finally banging some sense into Derek.

Anyway, Stiles is just glad that they aren’t going to have to drug the guy again. Because sure, he and Lydia aren’t exactly squeamish about extreme measures now, but there’s being ruthless and there’s being just a little too much like the very psychos they’re trying to keep off Derek.

“All right,” Stiles says. “Let’s get this curse session on the road. Sooner we pinpoint what it is, the sooner we all go home and update our dating profiles.”

* * *

So as it turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that. Because Derek gets them the samples and then they dunk him repeatedly in the cleansing bath while Stiles chants and Lydia waves candles and makes faces when Stiles’ pronunciation goes off-beat, and nothing happens. So Stiles and Lydia take the samples and run a literal library’s worth of tests, to the point that they actually have to go back to Derek two times to re-up the samples, and the conclusion is…

“What do you mean, I’m not cursed?” Derek says. “I thought you said that the stats said I was.”

“We said that the stats said something funny was going on,” Stiles says. “And we still think that, okay? Just because you’re not cursed doesn’t mean we’re blaming you. It’s just, sometimes correlation is not causation.”

Derek looks flatly at both of them, while the rest of the pack watches in blatant fascination from various perches in the first floor of Chris Argent’s house. Which _is_ Derek’s fault, because despite Lydia’s brutal way with sarcasm and Stiles’ tendency to pursue leads in socially-unacceptable settings, neither of them are actually assholes enough to purposefully air Derek’s romantic issues in the middle of a pack meeting. They were going to catch Derek afterward, but when Stiles tried to tell Derek that the findings were in, Derek had to go and loudly ask what they were.

“He means, just because two things seem to be happening at the same time, it doesn’t mean that one is causing the other. It could be just a coincidence, or there could be a third thing that’s causing them both,” Scott helpfully explains. He blinks a few times at the looks he gets, and then lifts his binder off his lap. “We just went over it in class today.”

“You’re seniors in your last semester and _this_ is when you get to correlation?” Laura says. “What the hell did you learn before? Long division?”

Lydia reaches over and grabs the back of Laura’s neck. Laura’s still technically an alpha and her eyes flare red, but she’s already ducking her head to make it easier for Lydia. “Anyway, Derek, like I pointed out before, there could be other reasons besides curses,” Lydia says.

“Yeah, like I don’t know how to date anybody except for sociopaths,” Derek says. He’s a little less strident about it than expected, and then he raises his brows at them. “Come on, okay, I know everybody’s been thinking about it. Since at least one of you says so whenever you have to come get me.”

“But that was joking, and now we’re…um, I…cannot figure out how to be tactful about this but yeah, okay, we want to eliminate all the causes so we need to be systematic about this,” Stiles says. “And that is a possibility, and we should look at it, and I know we’ve all been collectively dickish before but we, Lyds and me at least are really worried, and it’s not about crushing your ego—”

Derek sighs and rolls his eyes and starts smushing into the couch so that Stiles momentarily thinks the man might revert to a spiky fringe of hair again. But then Derek digs his heels into the carpet, ignoring Chris’ glare, and just flips his hand. “My ego stopped caring about the zillionth time I passed out from a kiss and woke up in chains,” he says. “I want this to stop. So if I’m doing something wrong, we should find out so…Lydia?”

“Hmm?” Lydia says, shifting back from Derek. She lets go of Laura’s neck too, and primly adjusts her skirt as Laura straightens up, looking curiously at both her brother and Lydia. “Right. I’m glad you’re willing to be reasonable about this, Derek. It’ll make everything go a lot faster.”

Now Derek looks dubious again. “Which would be…more samples?”

“Is that why you two keep circling him like he’s holding your stash?” Erica chirps. She kicks her feet from where she’s draped over the staircase railing, then makes a face at them. “Come on, we’ve all been seeing it. Gotta be the only reason why you two and Laura are in there with him—sorry, Derek, but you still reek.”

“He does not,” Stiles says automatically, and for some reason that earns him a suspicious look from Derek. “Guys, we’ve all been splashed with worse. I mean, the time with the sulfur—anyway, Isaac, Scott, c’mon, you guys love bulgogi.”

Scott looks guilty, but Allison is sitting on him so all he can do is shift uncomfortably. Isaac doesn’t even bother, and just keeps on rooting through the Argents’ pantry as he calls out a rejoinder. “That’s a meal, Stiles, it’s not twenty-four-seven garlic invasion. And anyway, you’re the one who lives on garlic and green onion chips and makes his dad eat veggie burger patties.”

“That is a lie! The chips thing, I mean,” Stiles says. “And those are top-quality vegan patties, I’ll have you—”

“No, it’s not more samples,” Lydia says pointedly. She smiles at Derek, who looks grateful enough, and weirdly not grudging about it, that she’s thrown for a second. Then she recovers, pulling her laptop onto her knee. “This is probably behavioral, not biological, so for that the best trouble-shooting methods are field testing.”

Derek starts to look antsy. “So what, I have to start dating again, and you’re going to watch?”

“I thought we were trying to cut down on police incidents?” Chris says. He’s been oddly quiet so far; he’s not exactly a motormouth, but he generally is pretty involved in pack meetings. Especially once they all, including Stiles and his father, realized that they’re both more comfortable and better at implementing alibis if Stiles’ dad and Melissa skip the meetings and just get filled in afterward. “We’re going to stay stretched thin for patrols until school is over.”

He doesn’t say that Jackson, like the dick he is, caused that problem by withdrawing from the whole pack when he and Lydia broke up. So fine, nobody but Lydia and Scott, and occasionally Allison, could tolerate Jackson for very long, but they were prepared to keep working with him because pack is a commitment you make despite assholes. But Jackson had informed them that he didn’t need them slowing him down and booked it, and now they’re down a man.

Lydia stiffens a little, and then covers by reaching for her phone. But it’s slipped out or something, because she takes her hand out of her purse and then pats around the couch, looking increasingly frustrated, till Derek, not looking at her, flicks his hand and up pops her phone between his fingers.

“We’re going to start a little lighter than that,” Lydia says, taking the phone. She unlocks it and then leans over to show Derek the screen.

Derek startles, then looks warily at her, and only then tilts his head to see the phone. “A…dating app,” he says.

“Swipe right for down with it, swipe left for no way,” Stiles says, opening up his laptop. “It’s hacked so we can see your results on our computers, but nobody else can. You’re not actually setting up dates with anybody. We just want to see if maybe it’s…something to do with how you’re choosing people.”

“You mean you’re gonna check if my brother has an unconscious psycho radar?” Laura says, scooting down the couch to peer over Lydia’s shoulder. When Lydia elbows her off, Laura climbs up onto the back of the couch, where Derek tries to reverse-headbutt her off. Laura grins and grabs a fistful of his hair, then pushes his head forward so he’s almost grinding it into the phone. “That’s actually a good idea. If this works, let’s do Peter next.”

Peter doesn’t look up from where he’s still reading through the printout of the collected curse-testing results, like the secret magic nerd he is. “Unnecessary. I’m completely conscious of the fact that I’m attracted to ruthless, powerful individuals who will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

“Do I have to do this in front of everybody?” Derek says. He’s still hunched over even though Laura’s eased off on his hair, and after a second Stiles realizes Derek’s trying to shield the screen as he swipes.

“No,” Stiles and Lydia say. 

“The only people who are going to see these are us. And, well, Chris,” Stiles says.

Chris jerks his head up from not-so-covertly eyeing the printout Peter’s holding, like the hopelessly nosy hunter he is. “Wait, what?”

“Why are you bugging my dad?” Allison chimes in.

“Because Lydia and I are good, all right, but we don’t have all the bases covered for identifying every single kind of supernatural psycho out there,” Stiles says. 

He sees the way Derek’s starting to shift in his seat and slides from the armchair to the couch arm on Derek’s side. Gets a good whiff of garlic on the way, and yeah, it’s strong, but it’s not offensive. If anything, it’s delicious, and he probably shouldn’t get sidetracked into fantasies about eating Derek, if only because that’s going to get his stomach signals crossed and he doesn’t need it growling every time he sees the man.

“Also, he’ll keep his mouth shut about whatever he sees,” Stiles adds. And then sighs as Scott immediately starts to object. “Scotty, we’re bros, and you and Allison are one heart in two bodies, but her telling you about something still counts as telling somebody else. No offense.”

“Oh. No, that’s…actually probably right,” Scott says, much more graciously than either his or Allison’s embarrassed faces would have predicted. “Well, for me…”

“No, yeah, that’s…true,” Allison admits. “Just try to not traumatize my dad, okay?”

Chris finally shakes off his shock to give her a look that’s half-touched, half-exasperated. “I think I’ll be fine, Allison,” he says, and then he takes a deep breath, putting his hands down to get up.

Which he doesn’t do, because he coughs instead, then rubs hard at his nose. Derek rolls his eyes, like he’s just his usual annoyed, but then he abruptly shoves his way off the couch, so quickly that he knocks into both Stiles’ and Lydia’s laptops on the way. Of course, he’s also got the werewolf reflexes to steady those before either Stiles or Lydia can do more than yelp, but he looks more than a little ruffled and that’s odd. He seems just as surprised as they are that he did that.

“I get it,” he says after a second. He’s got Lydia’s phone in one hand, and he turns around so that she has a good view of it as he edges towards the downstairs bathroom. “And fine, I guess that makes sense. So I’ll sit in there and swipe, and you guys can still see it on the laptops out here, right?”

Lydia nods. Stiles gives Derek a thumbs-up. Derek retreats to the bathroom, while Isaac finally comes out of the kitchen. At least the guy brings snacks for the rest of them.

“So I know you wanted dip, but all they’ve got is garlic-flavored hummus,” Isaac says, handing over pita chips to Boyd.

“Oh, give me that,” Lydia says, raising her hand.

Erica stops with a pickle halfway to her mouth. “You like garlic? You, alpha who once realized I’d been replaced by a podwolf when you noticed I was wearing the wrong perfume?”

“And what, those pickles are garlic-free?” Stiles says, sliding over to Lydia. “So, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yes, but…” Lydia looks up, then around. And then she raises a brow as Chris sighs and gets up and comes to sit where he can see their laptops too. “Well?”

* * *

Okay, so actually, being dutiful little scientists, Stiles and Lydia repeat the dating app experiment too. They use three different sets of prospects, both to control for Derek’s familiarity with the locals and for the possibility that the region in general just attracts a homicidally-inclined crowd (which is not an unreasonable hypothesis, even with the Nemeton gone). And after Chris provides his input, Stiles and Lydia do some independent verification to confirm their suspicions, to factor in hunter bias.

This time, when they have the results, Derek actually answers his phone, and then he shows up on Stiles’ front porch like Stiles suggested. He even knocks, which worries Stiles’ father to no end.

“You never knock,” Stiles’ dad accuses, shadowing Derek up to Stiles’ room. Then he walks past the nonplussed werewolf and goes to Stiles’ window, and starts opening and closing it. Once he’s sure it works, he pushes it all the way open and then peeks through it with his gun drawn. “What’s going on?”

Stiles and Lydia watch this from Stiles’ bed. “Uh, Dad?” Stiles says. “Is something—”

“Do you want me to go back out and climb up the wall?” Derek says, looking way more put-upon than anybody who’s been tased to the floor of Stiles’ bedroom as many times as he has should be.

“What’s wrong with our roof?” Stiles’ father snaps. “And don’t give me the runaround about it’s almost fixed, all right, I just got a voicemail from the city attorney and the FBI’s requesting more things from the evidence room. If we have to make something up for them, we need to start now.”

“We don’t need to make anything up for them,” Lydia says, though she’s already double-checking her and Stiles’ phones for last-minute texts. “Well, nothing that we weren’t already making up. Derek’s just over to talk. Personal issue of his.”

Stiles’ dad finally backs out of the window, rubbing at his brow. He’s stressed and as always, Stiles feels like it’s something he missed that’s dumping work on his father, and some of that must show because his dad looks at him and then sighs. “I think the FBI won’t be a big deal,” he says to Stiles. His expression hardens a bit as he looks at Lydia. “This time. If Whittemore can’t keep his father in check—”

“Dad, Jackson dumped us,” Stiles yelps. He drops all his printouts in his haste to scramble over to Lydia’s side without seeming to scramble, and then he just gives up on being smooth and drops his arm around a very stiff pair of shoulders. “And before you ask, yeah, we totally fixed his caboodle and he’s not going to be coming at us—”

“Not unless he wants to be picking bits of his Porsche out of his ass for the next ten years,” Derek mutters. He’s always vicious, that’s basically baseline Derek, but he’s usually not so heated too. And when Stiles’ dad looks over, Derek just grins like the big, buff, asshole werewolf he is.

Stiles’ dad spends a moment looking appropriately disapproving-father, and then he shrugs. “Oh, okay,” he says. He pauses and then shifts to slightly chagrined as he looks back at Stiles and Lydia. “I was wondering why he didn’t come around anymore, but just assumed you were hiding him from me.”

“ _Dad_ ,” Stiles says. He’s…actually kind of hurt. Yeah, okay, so he and his dad were about as truthful with each other for a while there as Allison and Chris were (although his dad never outright lied to cover stupid self-sacrificing moments like Chris), but they’ve been a lot better. Stiles has put a lot of effort into that, and he honestly thought that his dad was getting it. “No, we just—it’s been busy, you know, and I figured you didn’t need to stay up to date on the relationship nitty gritty with FBI in your hair.”

Something squeezes Stiles’ hand. He doesn’t look over, but he senses Lydia moving and twists around so she can lean over and start collecting his spilled printouts, thereby covering up her little comforting gesture.

“Anyway, if his dad gets in the way again, my family can deal with that asshole. We only haven’t because Stiles and Lydia keep saying play nice,” Derek says. He’s turned around to pull out Stiles’ desk chair and plop into it, and so he misses the slightly alarmed look Stiles’ father gives him.

“I…appreciate the restraint, since as much of a pain in the ass as David Whittemore is, he’s still a citizen of this town,” Stiles’ dad says slowly, with a warning note that totally isn’t going to register with Derek. Then he sighs and looks at Stiles and Lydia again. “Well, I’d like to say that I’d miss him, but…anyway, I know you two…put a lot into…er…”

Stiles knows that awkward tone, and has to resist a sudden urge to face-flop into the bed. “Um. Dad. So…Lydia was the only one who was dating him. We were both his alphas and he ditched that too, but—”

“Anyway, I’ve come round to the pack line, which is the right one in this case,” Lydia says. She’s a little strained at how airy she’s trying to sound, but the edge to her smile looks easy enough. “Jackson is a douchebag, and we are both better off without him, no matter who was personally involved.”

“Right. Well…I’ll just…just tell me if anything is actually going on, all right?” Stiles’ dad says. He starts to walk to the door, then pauses, swivels, and points at Stiles. “And you. Whatever’s been keeping you up all week, you need to ease off that too. I’m going to believe you when you say it’s a nonviolent research project, but you still need sleep, Stiles. You’re not all nocturnal.”

“Yeah, yeah, Dad, I know, I’ll be okay,” Stiles says. “I mean, look! We even have Derek coming by in daylight!”

Derek looks at Stiles’ dad. Stiles’ dad looks back, and then shakes his head and stalks out, muttering about bad influences and reminding Chris and Melissa that alpha status only supersedes curfews in true emergencies.

“He actually thought you were both doing Jackson?” is what Derek says, once Stiles’ father is gone.

“Dad still doesn’t totally get the whole alpha thing. Not that your family’s helped a lot with that. Or the Argents either,” Stiles mutters. Lydia hands him his printouts and he reshuffles them so they’re in order. “You’re all pretty handsy for people who like to threaten anybody they feel like, and speaking of, please try to not remind my dad you’re kind of a homicidal maniac too, would you? He’s _also_ still adjusting to the grey morality stuff.”

Shockingly, Derek actually looks dismayed. “Yeah, right, sorry,” he says. He rocks back and forth in the chair a few times, then raises his brows. “So? You said you had results?”

“You don’t smell like garlic anymore,” Lydia says. She’s kind of absentminded about it, so Stiles checks to see if she’s doing the banshee trance thing, but nope, she just looks sort of tired. And then she grimaces and presses her hand to the side of her brow, while her other hand pulls an energy bar from her purse. “Ignore me, I just skipped lunch to finish pulling together the analysis.”

“Lyds, you gotta stop doing that. If your blood sugar is low and I’m sleep-deprived, we accidentally take over the world, remember?” Stiles says. He pauses his reordering of the results to try and get at his drawer stash, only to be preempted by Derek.

Who produces a small, cheerfully green bag covered in Comic Sans-type Japanese characters from somewhere, which he tosses to Lydia. By the time her eyes have widened with surprise and recognition, she’s already got the bag open and has popped some of the contents in her mouth. And it’s apparently one of those bizarre Japanese novelty snacks, which judging from the cartoons on the front, is supposed to be pasta-flavored, but judging from the smell, mostly consists of garlic. Whatever, it’s delicious.

“Should I come back once you two are done?” Derek says. He’s got his eyes averted from what Stiles and Lydia are doing to the bag.

“Shut up, you eat raw rabbit ears,” Stiles mumbles, wiping crumbles off his mouth and fingers. Then he goes back to his slightly-grease-stained printouts. “Okay, so…you remember what Scott was saying about correlation the other day?”

“No, but I know what that means,” Derek says. He’s already hunching into a brace position. “Let me guess. I’m really good at picking out killer assholes?”

Lydia takes a tissue from her purse and dabs her lips clean, while tilting her head back and forth. “Well, to be honest…till you showed that you know about my garlic stress-eating, it was the strangest thing I’ve seen this week. You had a ninety-five percent success rate, Derek.”

“Hey, so before your shame issues take over, I just want to point out that being aware of the problem alone is a huge step, and also, we can totally put this to use for the pack’s benefit,” Stiles says. “You just have to—”

“Mention whenever I’m attracted to somebody and never date them because we’ve either killed or exiled them?” Derek says. He’s gone beyond hunching to slouch so much he’s practically doubled over on himself, his head going back so that he can give the ceiling a look of bitter resignation. “Maybe I should take up Erica’s offer to walk me through the safe sex store.”

“Ah,” Stiles says, dragging his eyes out of Derek’s crotch. Because slouching like that also makes Derek’s knees sprawl so wide that Stiles would have to turn all the way around to not be looking in that direction. “That’s…that’s unusually pragmatic of you.”

Derek jerks his shoulders, and in the process his jeans pull even tighter across his groin and Stiles clearly hears a small, if cut-off, noise from Lydia’s direction. “Yeah, well, I don’t actually want to die on a date,” he says, apparently not noticing either of them. “I mean. I don’t want to live like a monk either, but that’s starting to look like the only way to go.”

“I think you’re jumping to conclusions again,” Lydia says. She’s recomposed herself to look irritably prim, though she’s a little flushed. “Also, mixing your metaphors. I do _not_ think that monks have memberships to toy of the month clubs.”

“What?” Derek says, bringing his head up. “Seriously? Is that why she’s always off in the corner and giggling at pack meetings?”

“Derek, there are things we need to know as alphas, and there are things that we are not going to ask about unless averting the apocalypse depends on them,” Stiles says. He puts his printouts aside and then rummages around till he finds the binder that he and Lydia put together. Then he holds that up for Derek to see. “Let’s try graduated steps first. This binder contains a quick guide to detecting and identifying the naturally homicidal, whether that’s due to species or personality.”

“It’s two inches thick,” Derek observes.

Lydia rolls her eyes and then holds out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

Derek pulls that out and tosses it to her, and then looks suspicious. “What are you doing to it?”

“Tip twenty-three in the dating etiquette subsection,” Stiles mutters, flicking the appropriate tab. “Always retain control of your primary method of calling for reinforcements.”

“Which are…you, and whatever, I’m just going to end up doing this anyway because you want me to,” Derek mutters back. He pushes himself out of the chair and comes over to grab the binder, and then stands by the bed pretending to leaf through it as Lydia fiddles with his phone. “Are you downloading another app? Because I still don’t understand why I need a how-to-werewolf app—”

“We put that on your phone so if you ever run across any newbies, you can just have them play with the app instead of trying to give them lessons, because we all know how much you enjoy providing simple, non-cryptic explanations,” Lydia says. She taps at the phone a few more times, then hands it back to Derek. “I just put the app version of the guide on your phone. It’s got a step-by-step menu that’ll walk you through it, and you can enable voice commands too.”

“But you still need the binder because we didn’t have time to make up decision trees for some of the weirder species, and also, Danny won’t code when his boyfriend is in town,” Stiles says.

Derek looks at them, and then at the binder. He tilts the binder so that he’s letting it dangle from his pinched fingers, then tilts it back with a pointed grunt.

“You can leave that in the car and pretend you need to take a call when you need to check it,” Lydia suggests.

“Because that won’t make them think I’m suspicious or ditching them,” Derek says. But then he shoves the binder under his arm and does that neck-cracking thing of his, which either means he’s going to throw down or go off and take a nap. “Fine. Okay. So I can start dating again so long as I use this?”

“Whoa, hey, let’s slow the roll there, buddy, we’re still in testing phase,” Stiles says. “We figured first we’d all go down to the clubs, and we’d do some more field testing. Well, I mean, you will, and Lydia and I will watch.”

“Because we still haven’t ruled out that it’s some sort of localized phenomena that’s messing up your senses. We aren’t saying you’re incompetent, Derek. We just don’t have enough information at this time,” Lydia adds. She’s firm but just a touch quick.

And Derek isn’t even that irritated, weirdly enough. Once Stiles started talking, Derek’s brows twitched and then he pulled the binder back from under his arm, and began flipping through it again. His eyes flick back and forth and his lips purse, and occasionally an eyebrow jumps, and he just generally looks like he might actually be reading it.

“Okay, that makes me feel a little better,” he mutters, clearly not thinking about it. Then he looks up over the binder at them, and the slightest trace of embarrassment crosses his face. “Like I said, I’m really tired of going out there and getting in trouble for it. I’m…not a monk, but the break’s been pretty nice so far.”

“Oh, well, good,” Stiles says. “Well, so take a couple days and bone up, and when you think you’ve got that stuff down, we’ll schedule a club night and troubleshoot your game.”

Derek’s eyes start to roll and he tries to hide it by worming his phone back into his jeans pocket. And worming is the correct word for what he needs to do to get the denim to stretch that much more. “I’m going to need a couple just to be up to dealing with your comments all night. But…hey, look, I do appreciate this. It’s—it’s more than anybody else has done so far.”

He looks at Stiles and Lydia to say that, and then looks away as soon as he’s done. Well, actually, he doesn’t just look, he does the whole cool saunter out of the room, like that wasn’t just an awkward, uncomfortably heartfelt admission.

“Stiles,” Lydia says a few seconds later. Her tone is light and breezy. “Stiles, I think I’m rebounding. Tell me this is a terrible idea.”

“I think it’s savior complex. You know, you get over-invested in helping somebody, and all these feelings get confused, and also, he’s really, really hot,” Stiles says. “And since he’s been staying in, we haven’t had anything to make us so annoyed at him that we can ignore that.”

They look at each other, and then Lydia puts her hand to the side of her brow like she has a headache. She starts picking up things from the bed, lifts a brightly-colored piece of foil, and then they both grimace at the empty Japanese snack bag.

“We need a third opinion,” Lydia says.

* * *

“Me?” Scott says, frowning at all the paper that’s spilled out of Stiles’ backpack and slid across the table in front of him. “Derek doesn’t even really like me. Shouldn’t you talk to Laura or Peter?”

Stiles takes the backpack off the table, but leaves the papers on it so that he has something to cushion his head when he flops it down. “Scott. Just listen to yourself for a second.”

“Laura’s not psycho,” Scott says. He pauses, then sighs and idly starts picking up and shuffling together sheets. Because put a mess in front of him and ol’ Scotty can’t help but try and take care of it, with his usual mix of high-flying idealism and impractical loyalty and super-empathy powers. “Well, she’s not that psycho when it comes to Derek. And when Derek’s not being threatened, which…this doesn’t really count. I mean, it should—okay, never mind. But what about—”

“McCall, if you suggest Allison or Chris, we will assign you Erica as your patrol partner for the next month,” Lydia says. She doesn’t smush her face into the papers, but she sounds a little ragged and there’s this furious zipping sound, so Stiles figures she’s doing her absentminded obsessive nail-filing routine.

“I was gonna say Erica, actually,” Scott says. “She’ll spend the first hour being perverted about it, but after that she’s pretty good about relationship advice. And she knows everybody, and she’s not afraid to be honest with anybody.”

Stiles raises his head a few inches. “That…is actually a very sharp observation, Scott. Good for you.” He pats his friend on the wrist, then flops down again. “But Erica isn’t here, and we all know that this is her night for trying to get Boyd hooked up, so let’s just work with what we got, okay?”

“What’s with all these photos?” Scott says, holding up a sheet. “Are these from the dating app?”

“They’re the positives,” Lydia says. “We printed them out so Stiles could fool around with astrological charts and see if that was the key, but it’s not that.”

“Oh.” Scott shrugs and puts the sheet down, and then goes back to collecting them all into a neat pile. “Well, okay, so you two…think you’re developing feelings for Derek.”

Lydia’s nail-filing goes up a notch. Stiles flips his head to the other side, just to check that she’s not taking off flesh too, and finds that Scott’s already beaten him to that and snatched away the file. She glares at him, then tosses her hair dismissively over her shoulder. “It’s a feeling in the sense that lust is a feeling, Scott. And we all know that Stiles has been fascinated with Derek’s body since—”

“It’s not just me, okay, how many evil dudes and gals have paused to check those abs and given us the opening to take them down?” Stiles says.

“Anyway. I think putting a romantic reading on it is, while predictable given the audience, getting ahead of ourselves,” Lydia says, taking back her file. She puts it in her purse and takes out a compact to check her mascara instead.

Scott hums thoughtfully, and sort of politely disbelievingly. “So why are you asking me, again?”

Stiles gives his buddy’s knee a fist-bump under the table, and the corner of Scott’s mouth quirks up. Because he’s not really the grudge-holding type, but he’s also not the complete martyr he keeps trying to live up to, and sometimes he remembers that.

“Because Derek isn’t my type. At all. I have a very clearly defined type, and I don’t waste time and energy looking outside of it, and now I’m—I’m—” Lydia starts off calm and collected, but then her hands start gesturing, and the compact drops to the table, and in the end she’s sputtering just as much as Stiles. “I’m drooling over him, Scott! Do you understand how _not_ me this is?”

“And okay, I recognized before that Derek has a very advantaged physique, but that’s like recognizing the sun comes up when it’s daytime,” Stiles says. “I didn’t actually, like, think about doing shit with it.”

Scott nods and makes acknowledging noises, while he leafs slowly through his stack of photos. He’s weirdly intense about it but Stiles just assumes that he’s covering for the fact that he has no idea how to deal with Stiles and Lydia, and as usual, he’s too nice to just say so. “What’s the difference between now and back then? He still looks the same,” Scott says absently.

“Oversimplifying,” Lydia says.

“Grossly oversimplifying,” Stiles concurs. He and Lydia look at each other. “You know what, maybe we’re just making too much of this. So we’ve got a little temporary Derek lust going. Stuff like that happens.”

Lydia purses her lips and for a second he thinks she’s going to disagree vehemently. But then she tips her head to lean against her hand and sighs. “You know what, I’m probably just tired of my type turning out to be less than they seem, and all this digging into his love life is throwing me off.”

“Yeah, good point. I mean, so far it’s turning out that Derek is pretty much what you see is what you get, not that we didn’t already know that.” Stiles drags his arm out from under his head and flips at the edge of the photos Scott’s frowning over. “Maybe I’m bored. Dad’s finally kind of getting okay with things, and I’m just too used to having to dig people out of weird messes. Derek’s the only one who still has that problem.”

“I thought I caused a lot of trouble too,” Scott says. Then he blinks and looks sheepishly up from the photos. “You did write a white paper on it, Stiles. I don’t know if I read all the graphs right, but I was always going to try and read it.”

Stiles smiles and pats Scott’s forearm. “Yeah, we know, but we also gave a copy to Chris and Allison and they’ve made saving you from yourself into their weekly father-daughter bonding project.”

Scott blinks again. “So that’s why he’s suddenly okay with me handling his guns.”

“Well, I think we can leave it there, before we get any further into unintentional euphemisms,” Lydia says. She gets up and then hooks her hand under Stiles’ elbow to drag him up, too. “We’re also due to evil-proof the club before Derek gets there, so we need to get going. Congratulations, we don’t need your opinion after all.”

“Okay, well, let me know if you need help,” Scott says, already back to the photos. As Stiles grabs his bag, Scott actually starts to break down his ruler-perfect pile, laying out sheets here and there like he’s placing game markers.

It’s…a little weird, but Stiles and Lydia are running late. And Allison’s already heading towards their table, so Stiles figures it’s safe to leave Scott at whatever he’s doing. If it ends up Scott’s possessed or suddenly evil, Allison’s tased him before for being just himself, so Stiles feels confident she can take him down till the rest of them get there.

* * *

As far as Stiles can tell, Derek’s game consists of just standing in place and scowling. Literally, that’s all he does. He doesn’t even order a drink, and yet, he’s got them coming at him by the bucketful.

“I don’t think he’s even trying to flirt,” Lydia observes. “He just insulted that man to his face.”

“You sure that’s not just negging?” Stiles says, fiddling with his earpiece. They have Derek miked up, and also a couple other places around the table where Derek is sitting, just in case somebody decides to start cursing in the magical sense, but the club’s woofers are interfering with the reception. “I think that has some studies backing it up.”

“No, I’m one hundred percent sure he means it.” Lydia tilts her head. “Because he keeps looking at us and signaling for us to nix him.”

Stiles puts his face in his hand. “I swear, I don’t know what’s the point of coming up with hand signal codes if he’s just going to abuse them. The guy’s reading negative zilch on the psycho meter.”

“And I signaled that, but I think Derek might just be getting fed up,” Lydia says. “We might not have any dead-on hits, but we probably have enough data to extrapolate. Maybe we should call it a night.”

Which, of course, is when the woman walks in.

* * *

“You know, when I said I’d go along with all this testing, it’s not because I just felt like humiliating myself even more,” Derek says, pulling himself out of the back of the police car. “Are you just pulling this shit because you think it’s funny?”

“What, no, we’re—Derek, we’re trying to help you, okay?” Stiles snaps, following the other man into the station.

The cop who’d driven Derek over calls after them, probably because Derek went and snapped his cuffs and now they’re dangling like retro-punk jewelry from his wrists. And even if he’s one of the cops in the know, Stiles is dimly aware that just turning his back on the guy isn’t a good move. At the very least, it’s going to get him a lecture from his father about keeping up appearances and not demoralizing a police force which is actually doing a pretty decent job of rolling with the supernatural Easter eggs.

Well, whatever, Lydia’s doing the same thing. She jerks their lawyer between them and the cop, and then stalks alongside Stiles, her heels angrily clicking as they cross onto the station linoleum. “And we’re not just doing lip service, Derek, we’ve put a lot of our time and resources into this, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, and—”

“We’re not gods, okay? Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes we fuck up a little before we figure out, but we still damn well _try_ ,” Stiles says to Derek’s stiff back. “So give us some credit, would you? I mean, you’re not going to get stuck with another murder charge, at least.”

“Fine, so I’m just going to get stuck giving another stupid statement about a stupid killer who we’re just going to handle ourselves anyway,” Derek says, abruptly spinning around. He’s tracked them into an empty conference room; Stiles starts to glance around for anybody in the halls, but Derek snorts in disgust and distracts him. “I get it, okay? I’m just really fucked-up, and whatever is wrong is so fucked-up that even _you_ two can’t figure it out, and can you just—”

“No. No, damn it, because we are _this close_ to finding the cause, Derek,” Lydia says, folding her arms over her chest. “This close. And Stiles and I do not give up. You can if you want, but we won’t. Because that’s how much we care about your stupid, ungrateful, danger-attracting werewolf ass.”

Stiles yanks the door shut and then leans against it so he’s blocking the handle. “Yeah, what she said. Because that woman fit all the signs, and you _recognized_ that, Derek. I mean, sure, you bought her a drink, but then you picked up on it and tried to get out of there and—”

“And it still didn’t stop me from getting in trouble,” Derek points out.

“Yeah, well, it’s not a curse, and it’s not you. It’s definitely not you at this point,” Stiles says. He rumples his hand over his face, then winces when he hears his father’s muffled voice calling his name. “It’s not outside factors, it’s not internal, so the only thing we haven’t looked at is whether it’s them—okay. Okay. So this is what we’re gonna do, Derek. We’re gonna have you date us.”

Because the scientific method consists of systematically testing a hypothesis by changing one variable at a time, while controlling all other potential variables. And yeah, Stiles and Lydia are having weird like-like feelings for Derek, which will make it beyond awkward, but Stiles is willing to make that sacrifice and he doesn’t even need to check Lydia to know that she will too. They’re the alphas, and on top of that, they’re alphas who weren’t born or bitten into this. 

No, Stiles is still a human (albeit skilled in magic and several anarchist disciplines) and Lydia is a banshee, and they deliberately walked into the alpha role because they were tired of seeing people they cared about get hurt. They were even tired of seeing people they didn’t really care about get hurt (see: Chris Argent before he removed the righteous stick from his ass, various cannon-fodder classmates), because at the end of the day, a town where anybody can die just because somebody else feels like it is a pretty terrible place to live. So they read up and took over and they did some morally dodgy things—and still do them—in order to make that happen, but it was all worth it because they’ve really made a difference in people’s lives. And Scott isn’t the only person who thinks that’s important. Yeah, fine, so they’ll do whatever they have to so Derek can date again. That’s what Stiles means.

But before he can clarify any of that, Derek’s nostrils flare and his eyes blaze an angry blue, and then Derek straight-up busts out of jail. 

As in, he turns around and rams his way through the one tiny window, taking some considerable chunks of concrete with him. Stiles raises his hand, lowers it, and then raises it again as some bugs start to fly in through the hole.

“Did he just…” Stiles starts.

“Stiles!” The door behind Stiles suddenly opens and Stiles only misses falling into his dad because Lydia’s quick with the grab. His dad backs up, momentarily taken aback, but then he sees the big hole in the wall.

“Mr. Stilinski, whatever you’re about to say, we _know_ ,” Lydia says. She’s strident and unflinching and weary all at the same time, and it’s enough to stop Stiles’ dad mid-question. “Believe me, we know. We’re going to have to clean it up, after all.”

Stiles puts his arm up around Lydia, hugging her a little, and then turns to chime in. But then he sees his dad’s face, and how the anger in it is fading to worry, and he just…he can’t come up with anything.

“Look, just…get out of here for now,” Stiles’ dad finally says. “I’ll talk to the lawyer, but we were meeting late with one of the FBI people and they just went out to pick up pizza, and they’ll be back any second. And just be—”

“Pizza?” Stiles says.

Lydia elbows him. His father’s sympathy lessens noticeably. “I get to eat whatever I want when there’s a hole in my jail, Stiles,” he says. “Now get out.”

They get.

* * *

“That’s very nice of you to offer, Peter, but I don’t think sex is the answer here. Not sex with you, anyway,” Stiles sighs. He tosses his phone from hand to hand, then looks over as Laura and Lydia come back into the room.

Seeing as Laura’s got her least-favorite coat and her trash boots on, he can already guess what they’re going to say, but he waits anyway. “Derek’s not answering me either,” Laura says, putting her phone away. “Isaac and Chris say they picked up his trail in the preserve, and they think he’s holed up in that old distillery.”

“Old habits die hard. Every time he has a romantic setback, he ends up there,” Peter says. He takes his head off Stiles’ lap and sits up, and starts to pull off his nice merino wool sweater. “Well, since we _did_ have the foresight to take out all the machinery after our last little tussle there, it shouldn’t be too difficult to corner and drag him—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Scott says, coming in. “He’s already mad at you, shouldn’t we—”

“Scott, he might be mad, but history has proved over and over that Derek’s survival chances go up if we get him first and then fix his feelings,” Lydia says. She sits down on the coffee table and starts to swap her heels for hiking boots.

“But don’t you even want to understand why he’s mad in the first place?” Scott says.

Stiles grudgingly pulls himself up, surveys his clothes, and decides he’s not wearing anything he can’t replace in a five-second browse in the clearance section. “Well, yeah, of course we do. But understanding why Derek is mad is like trying to understand why cats purr, Scott. You just don’t.”

“Or…you do,” Scott says, and then he whips out something from behind his back.

It’s a collage. A crude, kind of serial-killerish collage made up of bits of different photos stuck together to make a composite face. Like eyes from here and a chin from there and hair from that one, and so forth, and Stiles is about to tackle his buddy for a soul-check when he realizes that the collage is familiar.

“Looks like Stiles,” Laura says, stating it for everybody.

“Yeah, and?” Scott holds up a new collage, of a red-haired woman who looks eerily similar to Lydia. And then another one, which resembles Stiles, and two more like Lydia, and a third like Stiles, and…

The pieces of the photos are familiar too. “Did you…take our dating app positives and mash them together?” Stiles says weakly.

“I was flipping through them and they all kept reminding me of somebody, and then I figured it out,” Scott says, proud of himself without being one speck arrogant about it. “Guys. He’s not picking them because they’re psycho. He’s picking them because they remind him of you two.”

They all digest that for a few seconds.

“Come to think of it, all the traits that have propelled you to alpha status are also traits that would be equally at home in other contexts,” Peter says thoughtfully.

“Evil contexts,” Laura says, nodding. “Although you never know, it might just be correlation that evil looks like Stiles and Lydia.”

“I hate you both, and also, you’re werewolves and family, and Derek sucks at lying, how could you miss this?” Stiles sputters.

“Derek is a terrible liar but he’s actually not bad at keeping a secret, so long as you never think to ask him about it,” Peter says. Still, he does look a little annoyed with himself. “Anyway, I’m an uncle, not a sister, and I’ve been too preoccupied with my own affairs to worry about Derek’s.”

Laura makes a face at him. “Because you’re a vain asshole who thinks Derek would never like the same things you do, because that might mean you’re not the only one who’s right for once.”

“And you missed this, even though Derek has a track record of failed relationships like soldiers have warzone tours, because?” Lydia says, voice lifting sharply.

“…because he had such a huge problem with listening to you guys in the first place, and it was such a fight to get him to see we were better off if I stepped down, and I was just so glad when he stopped bitching,” Laura says after a moment, her shoulders slumping. She rubs at her face a few times. “Also probably because I once lost my temper and yelled at him about Kate Argent, and he…kind of stopped sharing about his dates after that.”

Lydia looks at Laura for a second, then softens enough to put her arm around Laura’s shoulders, pulling the other woman’s head against her breast. “Well, all right, I think we’ve done enough post-mortem on the cause,” she says, petting Laura’s hair. “Now let’s go get Derek.”

Scott looks alarmed. “Wait, but—I just told you all that so—”

“We totally understand why telling Derek to experimentally date us is a huge-ass trigger for him,” Stiles says, getting off the couch. “Thanks, Scott. That really is going to help us. But we still gotta talk to Derek. And when Derek’s mad, the only way to talk to him is—”

* * *

“I know I should be glad you didn’t drug me, but I’m not,” Derek says, glowering at them from where he’s been bundled up into one of Chris’ nets.

“We know you’re crushing on us!” Stiles calls up to Derek.

The net twists slightly on its rope, which is hanging from one of the distillery rafters. Derek’s eyes glow with a decided bitchy vibe in the spaces between the shadowy criss-cross mesh. Then they shut and Derek performs as close as he can get to a head-thump while in a net.

“I’m not crushing on you,” he says.

“The evidence doesn’t lie, Derek,” Lydia says. She turns around and takes the two folding chairs that Peter has helpfully carried up, and then frowns at the third one under his arm till he sighs and retreats outside the distillery. Then she hands a chair to Stiles and sits down in the other, looking up at Derek. “And for your information, we only just—”

Stiles coughs. Because give credit where credit is due, no matter how frustrating Scott can be.

“ _Scott_ only just made us realize it,” Lydia grudgingly corrects. “We didn’t know before when Stiles suggested we date you, and we didn’t say what we did because we were making fun of you.”

Derek huffs in disbelief. “McCall figured it out first?”

“Um. Yeah. It’s okay, we told him no telling the rest of the pack till this is all settled between us three,” Stiles says. He puts his chair aside and stays on his feet. “Also—”

“No, I know you didn’t mean it like that. You’re not that kind of sadist, and I should know, given who my family is,” Derek mutters. He pauses as a muffled but clearly outraged yelp comes from outside, followed by the distinct scuffle of a werewolf pile-on. “I just was—upset about getting jumped again, and you guys were literally right there this time, and…and it just felt too much.”

“Yeah, we guessed.” Then Stiles sighs, because even from a net way up near the ceiling, Derek can send out those skeptic vibes. “The hole in my dad’s jail says so.”

“Shit. Sorry,” Derek says. “Tell him to yell at me, okay?”

Stiles opens his mouth and Lydia bumps him before he can say anything. Which is smart, because it would’ve been an exasperated, smart-aleck drivel that wouldn’t really help here, but also, he’s thrown off and he hates the feeling of being thrown off. So he’s annoyed for a second, and then he takes a deep breath and starts over.

“Derek, I’m not really sure why you thought it was such a huge deal to hide it that you actually went through the trouble of…of dating substitutes, but…well, one, Lydia and I are not so creeped out about that as worried, and yeah, that’s partly because our standards are skewed but we are totally comfortable with that,” he says. “Two, it’s…it’s not a big deal to us. I mean, we already did two out of three Hales.”

Lydia slaps her hand over Stiles’ mouth, and it’s for the sting because she knows full well she’s too late to stop him. She bobs her head in disgusted annoyance for a second, then looks back up at Derek. “What he means is—”

“It’s not because you already hooked up with Laura,” Derek says. The ropes rustle and for a moment Stiles thinks the man is cutting at them with his claws, but then Derek finishes contorting himself so that he can look more directly at them. “It is a little because you’re still hooking up with Peter, but—”

“You don’t have to be there at the same time! You can even work it so he’s always at least fifty yards away! That’s how I deal!” Laura calls.

Lydia winces, then sighs and nods. “Crude, but accurate.”

Derek rolls his eyes, and then he twists himself around some more, so his face is about as close as it can get to them. “Look, why are we even talking like this is going to happen?”

“Because…maybe it can? And not in an experimental context?” Stiles says.

“Don’t smash through the roof,” Lydia immediately says, swinging a dart pistol out of her purse.

“Well, don’t shoot me,” Derek snaps, even though he totally popped his claws for a second there. But then he pulls them back in and slumps in the netting, his head twisting so that he’s no longer looking at them. “Also, look, I can just—date people I don’t like. That should mean I don’t end up with anybody who wants to kill me, right?”

Stiles puts his hand over his face. “Derek, we’ve said this a zillion times, but we have one martyr in this pack and that position’s already more than filled by—”

“I’m not being a martyr,” Derek says. He pauses. “Okay, so I am, but you aren’t and you don’t have to date me just because you feel sorry for me. Or because it’s part of your testing.”

“What if we think you’re attractive?” Lydia says. When Derek twitches, she adds a creamy, slightly edged smile.

But then Derek snorts and actually rolls around in the net so that they’re staring up at his back. “Yeah, I know you do, but literally everybody smells like that around me. Even my sister.”

“That was when he dyed his hair and didn’t tell me, and I stopped when I saw who he was!” Laura yells.

Lydia presses her lips together, then looks at Stiles. Who’s already walking over to the distillery doors, waving his hands to shoo off the onlookers. Both Laura and Peter are a little slow to go, but luckily, Isaac’s arrived to help Scott drag them off. Stiles watches to make sure that Peter doesn’t wiggle out and sneak back, and then he closes the doors and scribbles some privacy sigils on them with chalk for good measure.

When he walks back, Lydia’s gotten off her chair and is standing right under the net, arms crossed, head tipped back, a little wrinkle between her brow that tells Stiles she’s about five seconds short of cutting Derek down just to avoid the neck ache. “Derek, let’s just be clear about something,” she says. “We’re not promising you true love. We’re not even promising that it’s going to turn out well. But whatever happens, we’ll still be pack.”

“Just like we weren’t doing all of this because we wanted to torture you, or to have fun with testing,” Stiles says. He slows a little, watching how Lydia pivots towards him, and then walks up beside her so he can sling his arm over her shoulders. “We were doing it because _aside_ from your stupidly hot body, we actually care about you and it’s not just pity, and it sucks to see you keep getting hurt.”

“So if you want to try dating us, well, we’re open to it. Not because we feel sorry for you, or just because we want to help you. But because we want to,” Lydia finishes.

Derek doesn’t move or make a sound for several seconds. He’s so still that the rope even stops swinging, and yet, somehow, while stuck in a net, he manages to look like he’s receding into the shadows.

“And you just figured this out,” he finally says.

“Yeah, well, we’ve been kind of busy,” Stiles snaps, his impatience getting the better of him. He doesn’t need Lydia’s heel grinding in his toes to know that he needs to pull back, and he starts rubbing his face again to try and cover. “I mean, between getting my dad out of the FBI’s crosshairs, and then Lydia broke up with Jackson, and all the usual saving the world and Argent versus Hale drama and—”

“That’s why I wasn’t going to mention it,” Derek says. He rolls around so that they can see his face again, then starts doing something to the mesh with his right hand. “You were busy.”

Lydia barely keeps herself from slapping her forehead. “You decided that endangering yourself was better than bothering us.”

“Okay, look, it wasn’t like I was going out on purpose and trying to find people who reminded me of you, it just…ended up like that, and it took me a while to figure it out too, and once I did I just…I didn’t know how you’d react, and I _know_ you wouldn’t kick me out of the pack for it. You’re better alphas than that.” Derek stops whatever he’s doing and scowls at it, and then extends two fingers and starts brushing them against the net, like he’s petting it. “That’s the whole reason why I didn’t want to dump it on you. Because it was still going to be really awkward.”

“Derek. It’s us,” Stiles says. “We live for awkward. God, I mean, _you’re_ the one who decided we were so incredibly awesome and crushworthy in the first place.”

“Yeah, what the hell was I thinking,” Derek deadpans, and then the bottom of the net rips open.

Stiles eeps and drags Lydia back, and Derek…neatly flips himself around to land on his feet, well clear of where Stiles and Lydia had been standing, as if they’d forgotten what a casual asshole he is. He gives his coat a few tugs, runs his hand through his hair, and then looks at them. 

Derek’s still scowling, but one doesn’t become alpha of three Hales without learning something about the nuances of the scowl. And this scowl, this scowl is ever-so-slightly brittle, like with just a little encouragement, it might crack and show something softer underneath. “So this dating thing,” he says. He shifts a few inches closer. “You really want to try it.”

Stiles and Lydia look at each other, and then they look at Derek. He twitches back, but it’s clearly reflexively, and once he catches himself, he deliberately rocks forward. And starts to grin, big and toothy and feral.

“No promises,” Lydia warns. She’s already shifting to flirt mode, her head tilting back and her breasts plumping up against her arms.

“Yeah, whatever,” Derek says, taking another step. He looks at Stiles, sniffs, and then turns his head and cracks his neck; the glint in his eye says he’s totally aware of how much that tic of his makes Stiles want to shove him. “I know what you guys are like.”

* * *

“Okay. Well.” Stiles props his arms up on Derek’s conveniently broad back, swallows a groan as his cock shifts in the other man, and then reaches for the water bottles piled up on the bedside dresser. “So the sex is definitely working.”

Derek grunts. Hard to tell what that means, even with Stiles’ dedicated study of the man’s nonverbal communication, since his head is still buried between Lydia’s legs. She came a good couple minutes ago, but she’s still got her hands on his head, holding him down. Which he seems pretty okay with, judging from how he switches back to purring as she runs her fingers through his hair.

“The sex is definitely working,” Lydia says. She lounges bonelessly against the headboard, looking as blissed-out as Stiles has ever seen her. “I’d actually started to forget that you didn’t need to fight first. Not that make-up sex doesn’t have its attractions, but it’s so much…effort.”

Stiles chugs some water, then puts the bottle back on the dresser and pulls his phone over instead. “And…seventy-two hours and Derek isn’t calling us from a basement.”

Derek finally pulls his head up. He leans on one arm and wipes at his mouth with the other, and then licks off his fingers. And then, like he totally doesn’t see how Lydia is biting her lip and jerking her hips back into the pillows, he glances around them. “Because we’re all already in one.”

“And that’s another hypothesis disproved,” Stiles says after a second. “I guess you can’t fuck the assho—”

His stomach growls. Derek glances over one shoulder, snorts, and then stretches his arm out to rummage around in the dresser drawer. Tosses around some lube, some knives, and then he comes up with a small foil bag that he pitches at Stiles.

Japanese novelty snack, garlic-flavored. Stiles makes a face at it, and then rips it open and digs in. Because one, guilt doesn’t mean he should starve, and two, Lydia is busy because Derek’s started eating her out again, and no matter how many dirty looks she throws Stiles’ way, certain foods are not compatible with sexual multi-tasking.

“You’re still in him,” she accuses, totally reading Stiles.

“Um, yeah, but I’m not doing anything with it,” Stiles says.

Derek grunts again, and does some amazingly wonderful thing with his ass muscles, and now Stiles is a liar. “This _is_ better than the usual basement,” Derek mumbles, nuzzling up Lydia’s thigh.

“Stiles, damn it—” Lydia bends over Derek, yanks the bag out Stiles’ hand, and then grabs Derek by the shoulders and rolls all three of them over, away from the food. “If we’re going to do this, we need to commit. If it doesn’t work it’s not going to be because we didn’t _try_ —”

Derek snorts, then does something that involves wet sucking noises and Lydia squealing and digging her nails into his shoulders till they redden. “’m okay with skipping the dating, actually,” he says in a muffled voice. “We can just do this.”

Stiles smacks him on the nearest body part, which happens to be a hip and the side of one buttock. And Derek makes this completely obscene noise and rolls back onto Stiles’ cock, and—whatever, Stiles will yell at him later. For something. Right now, he’s pretty sure they have some kinks to work on. Work out.

Whatever.

**Author's Note:**

> An earlier, incomplete sketch of the idea that became this story can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6059890/chapters/13892232).
> 
> So, everyone is still in high school. The TA reference is not meant to imply that Scott is in college while the rest are held back; TAs occasionally show up at the high school level, too. Although maybe the pack enrolled him in a special ethics elective just so he could stop pestering them with his moral musings.


End file.
